Putting on a Show

Abstract

In this chapter, I focus on the less obvious performative modalities through which the suffering migrant body is produced as a security threat, and by which extra-legal, inhumane and secretive security practices are endorsed. I build on critiques that suggest the offshoring of migrant control is a constitutive dimension of the political construction of seabound ‘asylum seekers’ as a security threat. However, rather than focussing solely on the geographical dispersal of asylum via the extra-territorialisation of refugee processing and detention, I want to consider how the project of border security has been sustained by the ‘offstaging’ of refugees and asylum seekers from the political scene within the performance of border security. These offstaging moves require closer scrutiny because, as with any performance, what happens outside of the perceivable bounds of the performance is as important as what happens within. I argue that while the performance of border security, state sovereignty, and even the state itself, is played out on the deterritorialised stage of the migrant detention network, projected to audiences within and outside the body politic, such performativity is sustained by its dark matter, the ineffable and undetectable processes, relations and experiences that are veiled by both practices of governmental secrecy and the limits of a scopic regime in which suffering migrant bodies are invisibilised. I suggest that the extra-territorialisation of migration control offstages migrants from the political scene, allowing for the presentation of the constructed security threat posed by ‘illegal’ migrants as ‘real’.