Book excerpt: In Crossing the TSA, Field notes on St. Louis, MO – Boston, MA Trips, the author analyzes her own recurrent experience of passing TSA security checkpoints. Airport security checkpoints mark a central axis that regulates language, behavior, and social status within travelers’ microcosms. There are three stations to crossing any given checkpoint. The exploration of those three steps reveals a subjective disassembling line. At the TSA, passengers are mandated to lay down their carry-ons and garments for inspection, raise their arms up and submit their bodies to an intrusive scrutiny. By regulating the body, the ego is also regulated. The TSA appears as a series of stages in a subjective disassembling line that transforms the original citizen traveler into an output called passenger. The TSA provides an institutionalized sense of safety.