Times simultaneously applied to members of the

times simultaneously) applied to members of the traveling public within
the space of the airport.
28
Rather than assume that the transition from consumer to suspect and
back again is a smooth or uncomplicated process, as the term consumer-
suspect , used by some scholars of surveillance studies would suggest, I at-
tempt to slow down passengers’ movements through the controlled spaces
of airports long enough to pay attention to the awkwardness of this perfor-
mance of dual citizenship: consumer and suspect.
29
I ask how these per-
formances differ, and I attempt to clarify the differences between these two
forms of transparency-as-openness to the environment’s wishes. Finally, I
examine how consumer culture has moved to appropriate airport security’s
aesthetics of transparency such that the differences and perturbations sep-
arating the appearances and behaviors appropriate to the conspicuous con-
sumer from those of the suspected terrorist are rendered more seamless
and perhaps less contradictory — at least on the face of things.
It also seems important to note here at the outset the defining tension
animating performances of consumer and suspect within the space of the
airport; namely, passengers’ simultaneous experience of privilege and sus-
picion. Airport security post-9/11 can be understood as an extreme effort
to protect first-world travelers’ privileges of mobility, access, and immer-

34 CHAPTER 1
sion. Ironically, in its attempt to protect these privileges, airport security
has inadvertently rendered passengers’ consumerist values and practices
suspect. Mark Salter understands airports as heterotopias or “social spaces
that are ‘in relation with all other sites, but in such a way to suspect, neu-
tralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror,
or reflect.’ ”
30
In this chapter, I examine how the
tsa
’s policies and pro-
cedures for monitoring the things passengers carry onto planes render
suspect (and in some cases invert) consumer habits, object relations, and
social relations among consumers as each of these is performed at other
sites like the workplace, the mall, the street, or the gym.
If the Panopticon is an ideal model of disciplinary power, the post-9/11
airport constitutes what Foucault would call a compensatory heterotopia:
“another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is
messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.” Airports are compensatory heteroto-
pias insofar as they express nostalgia for well-defined and controllable ter-
ritories and bodies, as well as objects readily identifiable as weapons. The
props currently used to produce the visual effect of the securitized airport
(gray plastic bins, blue plastic gloves, zip- top bags, and X-ray machines) be-
speak a hygienist’s view of security, where everything is separated, sorted,
zipped, sealed, and visible because evenly distributed in space — as if a
clean line of sight would guarantee detection of the terrorist threat lurking
within passengers and their belongings. Indeed, Foucault understands