`How do the American people know…?': embodying post-9/11 conspiracy discourse

Author: Jones, Laura

Source: GeoJournal, Volume 75, Number 4, August 2010 , pp. 359-371(13)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Conspiratorial thought has been highly visible in post-September 11th America, manifest through the continued growth of a public `9/11 Truth Movement' as well as at the state-level, through the Bush administration's conspiracy rhetoric of Islamic terrorists intent on infiltrating the US homeland. In this paper, I demonstrate how conspiracy can be understood as a `knowledge-producing discourse'; dialectically engaged across multiple subject positions and through which geopolitical narratives are performatively produced and contested at interconnected scales of bodies, homes, city streets and national `homelands'. Through drawing on, and challenging, the conceptual and methodological approaches of a burgeoning feminist geopolitics, I ground my analysis in the embodied performances of `patriotic dissent' by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement in New York City, as well as through my own situated and ethical engagement with positions of political difference.

Keywords: Conspiracy theory; 9/11; Discourse; Feminist geopolitics; Embodiment

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9252-7

Affiliations: 1: Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Ceredigion, SY23 3DB, UK, Email: ljj00@aber.ac.uk

Publication date: 2010-08-01