Porous Borders, Porous Bodies – Citizenship, Gender and States of Exception in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land

Abstract

The attacks on September 11 2001 have frequently been stylised as an unprecedented moment of national and global crisis. This ‘logic of exception’, as Evelyn Alsultany calls it, i.e., the presentation of 9/11 as ‘an exceptional moment of crisis [that] demands exceptional measures’ has not only engendered a fetishisation of ‘national victimhood’, but has also been used to justify state violence in the form of racial and religious profiling, increased surveillance, torture as well as multiple state invasions and other human rights violations. In short, it has produced what Giorgio Agamben refers to as a ‘state of exception’. Ironically, as Agamben claims, a state of exception constitutes a ‘space devoid of law [which] seems, for some reason, to be so essential to the juridical order that it must seek in every way to assure itself a relation with it’. In the United States, post-9/11 legislation has often invoked notions of American exceptionalism and an alleged patriotic duty to defend ‘the homeland’ in order to assume such an air of lawfulness. In fact, however, Agamben rightly maintains that the measures covered by the USA Patriot Act (passed in late October 2001) and President Bush’s ‘military order’ (issued in November 2001) have ‘radically erase[d] any legal status of the individual’. Although Agamben largely ignores race and racialisation as decisive factors in his discussion of the post-9/11 state of exception, it is particularly the suspension of Arab and Muslim civil and human rights that was facilitated by the disenfranchising legislation and its political, social and physical repercussions.