Abject Jurisdictions: CSI: Miami, Globalisation and the Body Politic

Abstract

This article argues that CSI: Miami disseminates two versions of politics, one of which replicates the conservative suppression of political debate in America post 9/11, and the other being founded in an understanding of the body as transgressive site of political activism. This second version of politics emerges out of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as a confusion of borders, which unsettles equally the discreteness of identity and the sense of order that subtends conservative politics. CSI: Miami can be multiply interrogated employing Kristeva's theory because the city it portrays, as well as the bodies inhabiting it, are both natured by an abject problematisation of borders. This paper explores the specifics of the portrayal of bodies in CSI: Miami, to suggest that abjection operates at the level both of discrete bodies and of the social domain of globalisation. In CSI: Miami, the political body becomes the body politic.