The event was predominantly mediated through security discourses of the “war on terror,” and this martial framing enabled the production of homonationalist rhetoric (drawing on Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages) that aimed to include previously excluded queer Latino/a populations within the American body politic. This article examines news and political mediations of security, race, and violence in the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in an attempt to isolate how dominant institutions reaffirm and preserve the North American state's monopoly on violence and cultural preservation through the calculated balance of security in relation to tolerance of diversity.
