The Hoodie as Sign, Screen, Expectation, and Force

Abstract

AbstractIn the aftermath of the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012, the hoodie became a material witness, called upon to tell truths about the body it covers. I propose that the figuration of the hoodie as an animate thing demonstrates some of the operations of power that deem some bodies criminally other—because they are black and therefore threatening—and available for state violence. Constructs of race teach us how to see, as Frantz Fanon observed so well, naming flesh an “epidermal schema” presumed to yield usable knowledge about humanness and its others through a series of abstractions shaping subjectivation from substance. The liberal disavowal of racism as the foundation for the rule of law proliferates such abstractions as alibis: the abstractions that script skin as visible or material evidence of ontological truth slide onto other surfaces, including clothing as indices for criminality, for instance. The hoodie is thus an example of Hort...