Conceptualizing the Biometric Body

Since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the American mainland, many governments have seen in biometrics an opportunity for significant advances and breakthroughs in securing people and their assets. With a distance of a little over ten years between us and the 9/11 attacks, now is perhaps a good moment for a calm and level-headed evaluation of biometrics, its security applications, and its future as an identification technology. In this chapter we examine the conceptual framework underlying the employment of biometrics. We argue that the biometric body—the body as conceived against the conceptual framework we will describe—becomes a fetish object, and that, in consequence of this, biometrics does not offer the possibility of breakthroughs or new directions in the realm of national security.