Lost Sociality of Skin: Security and the Pedophilic Function

Abstract

“Lost Sociality of Skin: Security and the Pedophilic Function” reads Russell Banks’s 2011 novel Lost Memory of Skin to connect efforts to protect society from the predatory pedophile to the securitization of virtual realities. Turn-of-the-twenty-first-century policing of pedophiles as potential sex offenders expanded security regimes to target increasingly virtual domains of human life. From 1990 to 2011, state and federal governments passed new laws broadening the definition of sex offenses, expanding police and judicial powers to target and punish sex offenders, and extending the reach of surveillance and security through new information technologies of offender registration and community notification. In place of the covert surveillance mechanisms associated with the Cold War, this governmental and legal apparatus is well publicized. The security apparatus of sex offender policing and management gains power through publicity, especially its public pronouncements of the potential threats of virtual predation. This essay argues that Banks’s novel takes up this public history and narrates it as a shift from two-dimensional models of representation (depth and surface) toward three-dimensional models (potential, possible, and actual) promoting virtualization. In so doing, the novel problematically proposes the white sex offender as the exemplary agent whose exit from virtual security can move us all toward emancipatory neo-human ecology.