Description
In this thesis, I examine three seemingly innocuous sites: San Diego’s Balboa Park in the 1980s and 1990s, the contemporary planning of an AIDS memorial in San Diego, and the contemporary neighborhood social networking website Nextdoor.com. I argue that these localized and innocuous sites act as mechanisms of the neoliberal security state—one that instrumentalizes subjects through claims to diversity, community safety, and individual responsibility; enfolds subjects through promises of care; and conscripts private subjects into tactics of security and surveillance through processes of securitization. Fears that permeate these sites invoke rigidly heteropatriarchal narratives that tell of the vulnerability of whiteness, family, children, femininity, and private property; all of these are especially vulnerable to what I call “out of placeness,” an assignment undergirded by national discourses of “homeland security,” linked to notions of risk and threat, and made on the basis of racialization, low socioeconomic status, and non-normative sexuality. These fears become more potent under the ongoing biological contagions of the HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis A epidemics that accompany the sites. This constellation of heteropatriarchal vulnerability is linked to white reproductive futurism which, when considered alongside attempts to manage contagion, takes on distinctly biopolitical overtones. These fears of white reproductive futurism are exploited—under neoliberal calls to individual responsibility for public safety and public health—to both uphold and justify security and surveillance in both State and community arenas. Oftentimes, securitization imperatives manifest through covert tactics meant to regulate and stabilize the permeable (and, therefore, vulnerable) boundaries of both physical and virtual space. My description of these sites as seemingly innocuous points to the fact that they seem innocuous because they are made innocuous under discourses that designate the maintenance of public safety and public health as both self-evident and compulsory. This sort of discourse renders any measures taken to maintain this safety and health—policing, surveillance, marginalization, and violence—allowable and necessary. It also renders critiques of these tactics nearly unthinkable. While securitization projects rely heavily on protecting heteropatriarchal vulnerabilities, the precarious health and safety of actually vulnerable populations are made more precarious and vulnerable.
