Feminist Surveillance Studies (review)
Edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.
This book boldly declares the inauguration of the field of feminist surveillance studies. I picked it up hoping to learn more about our interactions with systems of data production/collection (such as algorithms) and how they shape our sense of identity and subjectivity.
The authors argue for the need to think critically about the ways that the state collects and manages information. Under the guise of rationality, efficiency and neutrality, the technologies of data collection would themselves be structured under the logic of heteropatriarchy, colonialism and white supremacy. This idea has been circulating already in mainstream media: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/13/ai-programs-exhibit-racist-and-sexist-biases-research-reveals?CMP=fb_gu
To be sure, the authors are not just interested in examining the namely 'abuses' of data collection, but focus on what we perceive as the normal, acceptable uses. They put forward intersectional feminism as a productive site of reflection for surveillance studies, and call for an analysis of how ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, class, etc. foreground the very categories and rationality of technologies of seeing of the state. Part of the project of this new field is to recognize and recover the contributions of feminist media studies, Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze, as well as the critical scholarship on women of colour in terms of how racialized bodies become either hypervisible or invisible in their interaction with surveillance systems, both issues that have been addressed in the activist world by #BlackLivesMatter in the U.S. and #MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) in Canada. The editors also recognize Foucault's groundbreaking contributions to surveillance studies through 1975's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, in which surveillance is studied as a characteristically modern phenomena tied to the development of the nation-state. Foucault was key to understand that part of what characterizes the Western modern form of subjectivity is the internalizing of that state surveillance mechanism into the 'self.'
In the first chapter of the volume, Andrea Smith points at the need to also look at the state as a settler/colonial state. Smith is concerned with the historical continuities between the colonial surveillance of Indigenous bodies, their racialization, and their production as subjects of a heteronormative order. The production of the Indigenous body as sexually deviant (criminalized and pathologized) and at the same time deemed 'rapeable' is highly dependent on mechanisms of surveillance and regulation. Laura Hyun Yi Kang historicizes the development of 19th century anti-trafficking activists in England relation to modes of surveillance, and demonstrates how the practice of monitoring borders had initially a focus on female bodies in relation to disease, contagion, and morality. These concepts were in turn, already racialized in ways that it expressed anxieties about racial purity. In practice, these modes of surveillance did very little for women actually exploited while it multiplied the modes of surveillance in ways that it imposed multiple barriers and prejudices for women travelling 'alone.'
Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah provide a great analysis of how birth certificates, the very first interaction between an individual and the state, function as a technology that produces, rather than just records gender by assuming the legibility of the body as a stable marker of sex/gender. Jasmin Jiwani treats Canadian media as a form of surveillance in relation to their coverage of gender violence in racialized communities. Jiwani proves that the media manages to over represent the incidence of these forms of violence in racialized communities.
It is Dubrofsky and Wood's article on female celebrities on Twitter that lays some of the most interesting theoretical ground for this volume: they build on scholarship on digital cultures in relation to identity, subjectivity, agency and the idea of 'digital bodies,' which are the ways we write ourselves into being online, conveying information abut physical bodies (or at least, the assumption is that our digital bodies correspond with a physical body). Feminist scholarship has demonstrated how the male gaze is masculine as a subject position, as opposed to linked to male bodies.
To be sure, the authors are not just interested in examining the namely 'abuses' of data collection, but focus on what we perceive as the normal, acceptable uses. They put forward intersectional feminism as a productive site of reflection for surveillance studies, and call for an analysis of how ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, class, etc. foreground the very categories and rationality of technologies of seeing of the state. Part of the project of this new field is to recognize and recover the contributions of feminist media studies, Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze, as well as the critical scholarship on women of colour in terms of how racialized bodies become either hypervisible or invisible in their interaction with surveillance systems, both issues that have been addressed in the activist world by #BlackLivesMatter in the U.S. and #MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) in Canada. The editors also recognize Foucault's groundbreaking contributions to surveillance studies through 1975's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, in which surveillance is studied as a characteristically modern phenomena tied to the development of the nation-state. Foucault was key to understand that part of what characterizes the Western modern form of subjectivity is the internalizing of that state surveillance mechanism into the 'self.'
In the first chapter of the volume, Andrea Smith points at the need to also look at the state as a settler/colonial state. Smith is concerned with the historical continuities between the colonial surveillance of Indigenous bodies, their racialization, and their production as subjects of a heteronormative order. The production of the Indigenous body as sexually deviant (criminalized and pathologized) and at the same time deemed 'rapeable' is highly dependent on mechanisms of surveillance and regulation. Laura Hyun Yi Kang historicizes the development of 19th century anti-trafficking activists in England relation to modes of surveillance, and demonstrates how the practice of monitoring borders had initially a focus on female bodies in relation to disease, contagion, and morality. These concepts were in turn, already racialized in ways that it expressed anxieties about racial purity. In practice, these modes of surveillance did very little for women actually exploited while it multiplied the modes of surveillance in ways that it imposed multiple barriers and prejudices for women travelling 'alone.'
Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah provide a great analysis of how birth certificates, the very first interaction between an individual and the state, function as a technology that produces, rather than just records gender by assuming the legibility of the body as a stable marker of sex/gender. Jasmin Jiwani treats Canadian media as a form of surveillance in relation to their coverage of gender violence in racialized communities. Jiwani proves that the media manages to over represent the incidence of these forms of violence in racialized communities.
It is Dubrofsky and Wood's article on female celebrities on Twitter that lays some of the most interesting theoretical ground for this volume: they build on scholarship on digital cultures in relation to identity, subjectivity, agency and the idea of 'digital bodies,' which are the ways we write ourselves into being online, conveying information abut physical bodies (or at least, the assumption is that our digital bodies correspond with a physical body). Feminist scholarship has demonstrated how the male gaze is masculine as a subject position, as opposed to linked to male bodies.
Implicit in this essay is a call for feminist media scholars to update theorizing about the gaze and for scholars doing work on technology, digital media, and surveillance to take an interdisciplinary approach to account for the current cultural landscape and the critical implications for gendered and racialized bodies and identities when it comes to practices of surveillance (95).
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