We live in an era in which security politics are generated and sustained by the ‘war on terror’ (Dunne & Wheeler, 2004; Mueller, 2006). This war often targets mobile people. Therefore, security and international travel have become more intertwined with geopolitics and racial discrimination has continued to be a widely-debated feature of the politics of control (Anderson, 2013; Bianchi, 2006). Borders are the points at which individuals are subjected to power through their bodies and are being limited to an object of knowledge (Epstein, 2007). A
corporeal lens makes visible to us the ways the body comes to testify, along with our documents, about our intentions, character, utility, moral quality, and social and economic origins. Therefore, it is important to engage in an analysis of the ways in which bodies are constructed not only in relationship to a single sovereign, but also as bodies that negotiate mobile subjectivities with respect to more than one sovereign, a process that conditions the ways in which we understand ourselves as international bodies (Salter, 2006).
In my PhD research, I explore the border crossing experiences of Canadian dual citizens who have travelled internationally post 9/11. My focus in this qualitative research is on the ontological experiences of international travel. I seek to understand what dominant discourses materialize at border crossings and how these discourses become embodied in travellers’ experiences. In my research, I engage with the scholarship now often known as the corporeal turn in which the body, the social, economic-political conditions of embodied subjectivity, and the relationship between the body and the body politic are taken as important sites of political struggles. Through this presentation, I discuss how fragments of identity, such as race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and citizenship shape the border crossing experiences of individuals.
