Abstract
This edited collection comprises a diverse range of interdisciplinary contributions that aim to connect scholarship on gender and the media (old and new), gendered embodiment, and gendering of urban space to mainstream surveillance studies. The promise here is to gender and politicize surveillance studies by offering conceptual frameworks and case studies that illustrate the oppressive and disciplining, but also emancipatory, elements of surveillance from a gendered perspective. The introduction works well to situate the contributions in relation to earlier feminist theorization of gender and media that emphasized women as invisible and hypervisibilized, underrepresented, or excessively represented in homogenized and reductive ways (p. 11). These earlier gendered theorizations of seeing are connected to theorizations of surveillance including Foucault, Lyon, Haggerty, Ericson, and Bigo that feature across the cases and are telegraphed in the sections that follow. A particular strength is the exploration of tensions between aspects of surveillance including the panoptic (watching of the many by the few), the synoptic (watching the few by the many), and processes of governmentality, securitization, medicalization, and heteronormative forms of social control.
The first section, “Gender, Media and Surveillance,” includes assessments of young women’s navigation of social media and media depictions of women. Looking and being seen is explored as resistance, pleasure, entertainment, and performance through analysis of young women’s sexting practices (Karaian), Facebook profiles (Steeves and Bailey), and serial killer films (Reburn). An intersectional lens features in the chapter by Khoja-Moolji and Niccolini on the how young Muslim women work to subvert forms of post-9/11 and familial surveillance through memoir and blogging. This section works well in problematizing the male gaze, while offering a more agentic account of young women’s looking and seeing that critiques the moral panic associated with young women’s “risky” media use and as passive victims in need of protection. There is a stretch here to include diverse forms of communication as tools of surveillance. Karaian’s work also underplays the nonidentifiable aspects of sexting.
The second section, “Gender and Embodied Surveillance,” explores how bio power supports the racialized gendered surveillance of what constitutes normal or deviant bodies (p. 16). Mason’s account explores how mediated discourses (in media and politics) around sex-selective abortion have stigmatized racialized women’s access to reproductive health services. Here gendered and racialized surveillance is employed to reify citizenship boundaries evoking ideas about gender inequality and Canadian values in contradistinction to constructions of South Asian women’s reproductive behavior. Other chapters detail how surveillance medicine and the role of modern diagnostic technologies and networks including GIS and digital databases enable simultaneously an individual and a population gaze aimed at governing groups considered at risk, including those infected by HIV (Guta et al.). Other chapters detail gendered surveillance and disciplinary practices of the state in the treatment of trans people and nonnormative bodies, as in the case of the detention of whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (Fischer).
The final section on “Surveillance and the Gendering of Urban Space” also offers in part an intersectional framework. Contributions include accounts of how moral panic was used to surveil and contract public spaces open to gay men (Newman). Political and economic interests play a role in the operation of older forms of surveillance used to heterosexualize public space. Low-tech and lateral (peer) forms of surveillance feature in chapters on Ontario Strip Clubs (Law and Bruckert) and the dynamics of male interpersonal conflict in Australian nighttime economies (Warren et al). For Law and Bruckert, surveillance is carried out by CCTV and networks of employees and managers with different gazes and different lines of sight that overlap but do not necessarily all converge or work coherently together (p. 240). A strength here is the focus on resistance and subversion of surveillance albeit in ultimately constraining circumstances for women’s agency. The technologies and human capital employed to surveil Australian nightclubs relies on profiling young men as violent with life and death consequences.
This text widens rather than deepens the feminist consideration of surveillance. As such it will be invaluable for those within mainstream surveillance studies open to expanding their perspectives and others new to this area. It also works as a companion to the edited collections on surveillance studies. Density of exposition and repetition in some chapters have implications for the accessibility and readability of the text. While there was consistency across the chapters in methodological and theoretical terms, in some chapters the distance between the empirical case and the construct of surveillance is wider than for others.