ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with examining affective emotional dynamics of security practice and with the unconscious 'motives and forces of which people are largely unaware'. It explains psychoanalytical theory, to tease apart the relationship between security and affect within immigration detention. The chapter explains the feminist deployment of psychoanalytical theory to examine watching as a practice and instantiation of gendered power within detention. The feminist deployment of psychoanalytical theory draws attention to the problematic difference of women, and the neutralisation of that difference within spectatorship. The gendered character of vision that psychoanalysis places centrally has been supplemented by critical accounts which have emphasised how watching is organised according to racial and ethnic difference and is bound up with sexual identity. For male officers at Locksdon, work in a prison establishment enabled the articulation of a distinctive kind of masculine identity.
