Synopses & Reviews
Questions of gender, race, class, and sexuality have largely been left unexamined in surveillance studies. The contributors to this field-defining collection take up these questions, and in so doing provide new directions for analyzing surveillance. They use feminist theory to expose the ways in which surveillance practices and technologies are tied to systemic forms of discrimination that serve to normalize whiteness, able-bodiedness, capitalism, and heterosexuality. The essays discuss the implications of, among others, patriarchal surveillance in colonial North America, surveillance aimed at curbing the trafficking of women and sex work, women presented as having agency in the creation of the images that display their bodies via social media, full-body airport scanners, and mainstream news media discussion of honor killings in Canada and the concomitant surveillance of Muslim bodies. Rather than rehashing arguments as to whether or not surveillance keeps the state safe, the contributors investigate what constitutes surveillance, who is scrutinized, why, and at what cost. The work fills a gap in feminist scholarship and shows that gender, race, class, and sexuality should be central to any study of surveillance.
Contributors. Seantel Anaandiuml;s, Mark Andrejevic, Paisley Currah, Sayantani DasGupta, Shamita Das Dasgupta, Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Lisa Jean Moore, Yasmin Jiwani, Ummni Khan, Shoshana Amielle Magnet, Kelli Moore, Lisa Nakamura, Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Smith, Kevin Walby, Megan M. Wood, Laura Hyun Yi Kang
Review
andquot;Surveillance cannot but be about social sorting, so it must also always be about inequalities. This book prods and provokes its readers to focus critically on those inequalities so that the study of surveillance never slips into complacency or complicity.andquot;
Review
andquot;Feminist Surveillance Studies provides a much-needed set of feminist interventions into the study of surveillance. The essays offer critically important insights into the gendered dimensions of state surveillance, vividly outline the structural inequalities designed into surveillance regimes, and provide a wealth of avenues for future research.andquot;
Synopsis
Feminist Surveillance Studies is a field-defining collection that places gender, race, class, and sexuality at the center of surveillance studies. Concerned with exposing the ways in which surveillance is tied to discrimination, the contributors investigate what constitutes surveillance, who is scrutinized, why, and at what cost.
About the Author
Rachel E. Dubrofsky is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. She is the author of
The Surveillance of Women on Reality Television: Watching The Bachelor
and The Bachelorette.
Shoshana Amielle Magnet is Associate Professor at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race and the Technology of Identity, also published by Duke University Press.
Table of Contents
Foreword / Mark Andrejevic ix
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction. Feminist Surveillance Studies: Critical Interventions / Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Soshana Amielle Magnet 1
Part I. Surveillance as Foundational Structure
1. Not-Seeing: State Surveillance, Settler Colonialism, and Gender Violence / Andrea Smith 21
2. Surveillance and the Work of Antitrafficking: From Compulsory Examination to International Coordination / Laura Hyun Yi Kang 39
3. Legally Sexed: Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens / Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah 58
Part II. The Visual and Surveillance: Bodies on Display
4. Violating In/Visibilities: Honor Killings and Interlocking Surveillance(s) / Yasmin Jiwani 79
5. Gender, Race, and Authenticity: Celebrity Women Tweeting for the Gaze / Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood 93
6. Held in the Light: Reading Images of Rihannaand#39;s Domestic Abuse / Kelli D. Moore 107
Part III. Biometric Technologies as Surveillance Assemblages
7. Terror and the Female Grotesque: Introducing Full-Body Scanners to U.S. Airports / Rachel Hall 127
8. The Public Fetus and the Veiled Woman: Transnational Surrogacy Blogs as Surveillant Assemblage / Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta 150
9. Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia? / Dorothy E. Roberts 169
Part IV. Toward a Feminist Praxis in Surveillance Studies
10. Antiprostitution Feminism and the Surveillance of Sex Industry Clients / Ummni Khan 189
11. Research Methods, Institutional Ethnography, and Feminist Surveillance Studies / Kevin Walby and Seantel Anaandiuml;s 208
Afterword. Blaming, Shaming, and the Feminization of Social Media / Lisa Nakamura 221
References 229
Contributors 265
Index 271