Hair Lines

One of the sites where the politics of inclusion/exclusion are felt most keenly is the border. It is there that

all the intersections of race/class/gender/coloniality merge to a single, crucial instance, and through the

omnipresent eye of surveillance, are reduced to a pass/fail system upon which survival can depend. To

pass, the body must become undressed: you remove those articles of clothing that mark your difference,

and regardless, mechanized scanners can see through them, right through your skin, your organs, down

to your bones. This act of undressing reveals the ways that colonial systems mark racialized bodies with

both fear and desire: they are necessary resources that carry a threat inside them, an excess that

threatens to spill out at any moment.