40: Traffic

Introduction: A Bad Traffic Jam

Megan Shaw, Jonathan Sterne
We live in a distinct culture of movement. The essays in this issue of Bad Subjects attempt to define, consider, and criticize this culture of movement from a variety of perspectives.

The Politics and Presumptions of Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric

Gretchen Soderlund, Emma Grant
Stories about the sex industry are replete with references to sexual slavery, innocent victims, captivity, and deception. Together, these themes form a narrative template for every case of sex industry work involving illegal migrant labor.

Victims of Invisible Threats

Dan McGee
Chemical and biological weapons have thus come to symbolize absolute evil, and are thus utilized as propaganda weapons by the United States to justify the creation and maintenance of enemies, continued overexpenditure on the military, and specific policies to reward, punish, and even attack other countries.

North-West of Where?

Peter Ives
What is this national boundary that so shapes the character of my peregrinations? Of course, national boundaries are eminently concerned with people traffic. Their existance becomes frighteningly evident when examining immigration policies and the necessary labor performed by 'illegal' aliens at very low wages.

Ingrate

Jeremy Russell
Ingrate -- Three decades of ingrates -- a cartoon.

How to Get Things with Words (Notes on the "Big King")

Hsuan L. Hsu
Burger King's irresistible promotion seems to have raised the stakes of eating out, turning fast food restaurants into yet another arena for moral and ideological struggle against corporate brainwashing.

Staffing the Crisis

Jonathan Sterne
This year a strange thing happened to state universities.

Driving Through the Minefields of Love

Joel Schalit
Road trips were the place where my father and I first defined our relationship.

I Can Drive For Miles and Miles: Cars, Buses, Subway Trains, and the Politics of Public Space

John Brady
I rarely have the experience of traveling in public anymore. This loss of the experience of traveling in public is not only personal, but is also profoundly political.

Manifest Congestion: Freeway Landscapes and Timescapes

Megan Shaw, Rick Prelinger
Freeway time, as we see it, develops out of three currents: the historical narratives of which freeways are a contemporary expression, the physical isolation of being on a freeway, and the futures that freeway landscapes project.

Neighborhood Art Traffic Signals: Johanna Poethig's "Freeway Prophecy" Mural

Mike Mosher
"Freeway Prophecy" gently subverts automobillious hegemony with poetic young teenagers' visions, gathered in an autonomous urban alley now liberated via art.