Visualizing Homeland: Remembering 9/11 and the Production of the Surveilling Flaneur

The following analysis approaches the 9/11 Memorial through the lens of a moving methodology, which is grounded in the intersections of critical rhetorical theory and visual ethnography. An intersectional methodological approach takes seriously movement, affect, and aesthetics as primary modes of understanding in situ communication and reveals that the National 9/11 Memorial works affectively and viscerally to constitute the surveilling flaneur, a security-conscious consumer subjectivity who is mobilized through the temporal, horizontal, and vertical vectors of the site. Ultimately, I suggest that the Memorial's affective dimensions position the habitus of the surveilling flaneur as reflective of larger discourses about freedom in a post-9/11 culture.