Introduction

The recent intensification of gendered surveillance in the United States underscores how surveillance technologies continue to abet criminalization domestically while enabling the US to renew orientalist narratives of rescue with respect to its military interventions abroad. Building on the 2015 Feminist Surveillance Studies volume edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet, this issue seeks to make a number of new interventions in the study of surveillance and gender. First, it calls for the incorporation of scholarship that approaches the US-led war on terrorism through the lens of gender and sexuality to develop a more refined understanding of how surveillance practices and contemporary imperial imaginaries overlap and inform one another. Second, it reconsiders the frame of carceral feminism by unpacking some of the assumptions around “carcerality” and “feminism.” Finally, it builds on the premise that existing black feminist scholarship has for some time theorized surveillance’s relation to gendered oppression. To do so, it considers how critical framings of hypervisibility and invisibility help us make sense of the racialized, gendered forms of surveillance deployed across the decades: from the mid-twentieth-century national security state to the contemporary neoliberal postfeminist regimes of the twenty-first century

Seeing and unseeing Prevent’s racialized borders

This article provides a re-theorization of the Prevent strategy as racialized bordering. It explores how knowledge regarding the racist logics of British counter-terrorism are supressed through structures of white ignorance and how International Relations scholarship is implicated in this tendency to ‘whitewash’ Prevent’s racism. Building on the use of science fiction in International Relations, the article uses China Miéville’s novel The City and the City to undertake the analysis. Miéville evokes a world where the cities of Ul Qoma and Besźel occupy the same physical space but are distinct sovereign jurisdictions. Citizens are disciplined to ‘see’ their city and ‘unsee’ the other city to produce borders between the two. The themes of coding signifiers of difference and seeing/unseeing as bordering practices are used to explore how Prevent racializes Muslims as outsiders to a white Britain in need of defending. Muslim difference is hypervisibilized or seen as potentially threatening and coded as part of racialized symptoms which constitute radicalization and extremism. This article shows how the racial bordering of Prevent sustains violence perpetrated by white supremacists, which is subsequently ‘unseen’ through the case of Thomas Mair

Beauty surveillance: the digital self-monitoring cultures of neoliberalism

This paper argues that ‘beauty apps’ are transforming the arena of appearance politics and foregrounds a theoretical architecture for critically understanding them. Informed by a feminist-Foucaultian framework, it argues that beauty apps offer a technology of gender which brings together digital self-monitoring and postfeminist modalities of subjecthood to produce an hitherto unprecedented regulatory gaze upon women that is marked by the intensification, extensification and psychologization of surveillance. The paper is divided into four sections. First it introduces the literature on digital self-tracking. Secondly it sets out our understanding of neoliberalism and postfeminism. Thirdly it looks at beauty and surveillance, before offering, in the final section, a typology of appearance apps. This is followed by a discussion of the modes of address/authority deployed in these apps – especially what we call ‘surveillant sisterhood’ - and the kinds of entrepreneurial subjectivity they constitute. The paper seeks to make a contribution to feminist surveillance studies and argues that much more detailed research is needed to critically examine beauty apps

Democratic curiosity in times of surveillance

AbstractTaking my cue from feminist curiosity and literature on the everyday in surveillance studies, I am proposing ‘democratic curiosity’ as a tool for revisiting the question of democracy in times of extitutional surveillance. Democratic curiosity seeks to bring into analytical play the social and political power of little nothings – the power of subjects, things, practices, and relations that are rendered trivial – and the uncoordinated disputes they enact. Revisiting democracy from this angle is particularly pertinent in extitutional situations in which the organisation and practices of surveillance are spilling beyond their panoptic configurations. Extitutional surveillance is strongly embedded in diffusing arrangements of power and ever more extensively enveloped in everyday life and banal devices. To a considerable degree these modes of surveillance escape democratic institutional repertoires that seek to bring broader societal concerns to bear upon surveillance. Extitutional enactments of democracy then become an important question for both security and surveillance studies.</jats:p

Frayed Edges: Mediating Women in Popular Culture

A decade and a half ago, at my thesis defense, Dr. Marlene Kadar said: “your work is interdisciplinary, so it will always have frayed edges. That is part of the richness.” Dr. Kadar’s devotion to critical innovative groundbreaking scholarship—that aims to change lives and worldviews—honoring the messiness of the process, taught me to see the richness in the details, seek out the contradictions and paradoxes. My work tells the stories of how women are mediated, to open up larger questions about the mundane, everyday ways in which misogyny and racism are made normal and the complicated and conflicted manner in which popular culture tells these stories. My talk explores how my work lays bare the contingent, contextual and complex experiences of the women who inhabit popular media spaces and are the focus of my research, which is grounded in a Critical Cultural Studies tradition and propelled by early invaluable lessons from Dr. Kadar

(Always) Playing the Camera: Cyborg Vision and Embodied Surveillance in Digital Games

As the increasingly ubiquitous field of surveillance has transformed how we interact with each other and the world around us, surveillance interactions with virtual others in virtual worlds have gone largely unnoticed. This article examines representations of digital games’ diegetic surveillance cameras and their relation to the player character and player. Building on a dataset of forty-one titles and in-depth analyses of two 2020 digital games that present embodied surveillance camera perspectives, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix 2020) and Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft Toronto 2020), I demonstrate that the camera is crucial in how we organize, understand, and maneuver the fictional environment and its inhabitants. These digital games reveal how both surveillance power fantasies and their critique can coexist within a space of play. Moreover, digital games often present a perspective that blurs the boundaries between the physical and the technically mediated through a flattening of the player’s “camera” screen and in-game surveillance cameras. Embodied surveillance cameras in digital games make the camera metaphor explicit as an aesthetic, narrative, and mechanical preoccupation. We think and play with and through cameras, drawing attention to and problematizing the partial perspectives with which worlds are viewed. I propose the term cyborg vision to account for this simultaneously human and nonhuman vision that’s both pluralistic and situated and argue that, through cyborg vision, digital games offer an embodied experience of surveillance that’s going to be increasingly relevant in the future.publishedVersio

Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars

Rachel E. Dubrofsky Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022 ISBN: 9781496843326 184 p. $99.00 (Hbk

Communication + Surveillance

This essay argues for expanding the engagement of communication studies with surveillance studies by seeing surveillance itself as a communicative practice

5 reasons why surveillance is a feminist issue

Surveillance is woven into our everyday lives. While this in itself is not new, what we experience today differs in scale from, say, covert surveillance photos of suffragettes, tabs on unions and protesters during the Cold War era, or even the practices of the GDR’s Stasi