Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
the presence of a human body—a corpus—the corporatization of security privileges human bodies with access to wealth and resources over those who do not. As the protagonist says in the opening lines of Little Bee, this year's freshman common reading at Pace University, "Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl… A pound is free to travel to safety… A girl like me gets stopped at immigration…" d. Homeland Security In his opening remarks, the chair of the public sector panel—consisting of federal, state, and local police and emergency management agency representatives—introduced the speakers with a chuckle as the "Masters of Disaster." The international relations scholar Cynthia Enloe has observed that traditional notions of national security rely on and presuppose a set of gender relations—a masculine protector supported by a female "helpmate." It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Latin for "homeland" is patria—land of our fathers. Mary Louise Pratt, an NYU scholar of imperial literature, observes that European writers faced with the conflict between their own colonizing culture and that of the colonized, sought "to resolve political uncertainties in the sphere of family and reproduction." The potential explosive encounter with the Other was resolved through repetition of the trope of a nostalgic, romantic, patriarchal, and heterosexual vision of the "Home." Susan Faludi has commented on the revitalization of this "Guardian Myth" in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. This discourse constructs America as a "homeland" (rather than as a haven for multiple diasporas), a safe family space that must be protected by a militarized hyper-masculine guardian from the threats from a dangerous "Outside." But as the work of many feminist scholars and activists has demonstrated, the home and family are not necessarily safe places, or reassuring images, for everyone. The home embodies a political hierarchy—often one that places adults over children, men over women—and may be a place of great insecurity and violence. Upon walking into the lobby of the Schimmel Center on the morning of the conference, I immediately noticed several men in police and fire service uniforms. But even many of the panelists and participants clad in civvies maintained a remarkable uniformity in their discourse and worldview. Indeed, Joseph F. Bruno, Commissioner of the New York City Office of Emergency Management, contended that security and emergency management relied on "unity of effort," in which "local, state, and federal government… the private sector, …the not-for-profit community… utilities, regional partners, and others" all maintained "shared planning, shared objectives, shared data." Bruno was probably echoing the key principle of "unity of effort through unified command" listed in the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Framework. In a variety of settings, several thinkers have shown how an emphasis on "Unity" often stifles dissention and diversity of opinion. One should consider whether unity— "shared planning, shared objectives, shared data"—may only really be maintained when the group of people allowed to speak, plan, and act are relatively uniform. There is a totalizing edge to the discourse of Unity of Effort that implies that other plans, objectives and data would be interpreted as "Against Us" rather than "With Us." Indeed, by enshrining a "separation of powers" and institutionalizing conflict between different branches of government, one might argue that the authors of the US Constitution were nervous about Unity of Effort. The concept of Homeland Security relies on this uniformity, as it is ultimately parochial. It divides the world into "Home" and "Not Home" and privileges the security of "Home People" over those considered the out-groups or 'foreign'—people from "Away27