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Article published In:
Argumentation in the Media
Edited by Darrin Hicks
[Journal of Argumentation in Context 3:1] 2014
► pp. 83–101

Affective boundaries in a landscape of shame

Writing HB 56

| The University of Denver
Alabama House Bill (HB) 56 passed in 2011 and was written by Kris Kobach. The bill targets migrant groups, pressuring them to “self-deport”. Kobach’s language subjugates migrants in a way that defines their bodies with shame. I am interested in how Goodnight and Natanson conceive of risk in the practice of social argumentation. For that, I employ philosophical perspectives of affect to reconsider language as relational, and demonstrate how affective language moves bodies. I then consider the channeling of affect and the ways negative affects get strategically directed at defined subject-individuals, shifting presumption of not belonging onto those bodies exhibiting migrant characteristics within the state. Affect, modulated through language, creates affective boundaries, and I demonstrate how Kobach obliges citizens of Alabama to participate in both the shaming of the undocumented migrant and the maintenance of the affective boundary keeping the undocumented migrant body from citizenship.
Keywords: migration, Alabama Hb 56, risk, presumption, channeling, affect theory, shame, citizenship, lived argumentation
Published online: 7 May 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jaic.3.1.05lec
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