Description
This paper deals with a puzzle central to debates on biometric borders - what is at stake in the datafication of the body? I seek to reorientate this debate towards questions of what biometric bordering work does in the world: the sites of violence and struggle that open up within the relation between the body and its rendering as data. I contend that its violence lies not in the singular moment of identification. Instead, I ask what kind of collective affects, experiences, and sensations, surround and inhabit bodies within the biometric encounter? And how can we understand what is done to the body in all its historical weight and complexity? I explore this through the idea of cramped space, where biometricised bodies are interlaced with global social relations that constrain action and circumscribe political possibilities. Here, a collective sense of the duress of border violence, and the political struggle at stake in biometric histories and futures, emerges. As a shared sensory relation to the world, cramped space comes to bear on those bodies who are, or could be, subject to biometric exposure. So too, a form of embodied political engagement is necessary to frustrate it.
