Of force fields and men: fiction and race on the Mexican border

In this paper, I engage with the “invisible wall” at the Mexico-United States border. The idea of an invisible border is not new, but recent proposals are defined by the involvement of Silicon Valley, as well as by the use of Science Fiction (SF) and the mythological to reframe and create new fictions. I trace the trope of the “force field” and the way it has been mobilized by Palmer Luckey in his promotion of the Anduril Sentry, a mobile observation post fitted with technologies of surveillance and deterrence. I argue that the SF trope can be traced to racialized understandings of the homeland in the nineteenth century and, later, in hegemonic tendencies in popular culture. Combined with evolving masculinities and far right politics, these SF tropes reinforce the already complex histories and historical violence of border technologies.