ABSTRACT
Fears of Somali pirates, "Gypsy" kidnappers, African warlords, Ebola, "Mexican meth," pimps, coyotes, gangs, refugees, migrants, and so much more, structure the dark side of a still-metropolitan unconscious. These are terrors over things that cross borders, and whose crossings threaten the sanctity of the structures anchored to territoriality and capital. These panics are defined not by place or scale but by travel, passage, transgression. These are panics over bodies that move. Cultural Studies has paid ample attention to moral panics as a rallying force for reaction and retrenchment but not explicitly to what happens when panics stretch over national borders and around the curve of the globe. The idea of the child powers panics around child soldiers, kidnapped children, underage workers, sex-trafficked girls, refugee children, drug dealers' targets, and victims of climate change. Even panics not about crime rest on a presumption of order.
