Abstract
In the introduction to Feminist Surveillance Studies, editors Rachel Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet make the claim that their book ‘formally launches the area of feminist surveillance studies’ (p. 1). This bold assertion has merit. While there have been some, intermittent feminist interventions into surveillance studies (e.g. Ball et al., 2009; Koskela, 2012; Mason and Magnet, 2012), systematic feminist analyses and modes of inquiry have been conspicuously absent from the field (see, too, Abu-Laban, 2015). This book is a very welcome intervention.
Organized into four sections – Surveillance as Foundational Structure; The Visual and Surveillance: Bodies on Display; Biometric Technologies as Surveillance Assemblages; and Toward a Feminist Praxis in Surveillance Studies – the book makes for engaged, critical reading across an astonishingly diverse range of subjects. The anthology covers a fascinating range of areas where feminist insights are brought to bear upon surveillance practices, such as 19th- and early 20th-century international anti-trafficking movements, contemporary sex work, birth certificates and transgendered subjects, airport full body scanners, international surrogacy blogs, genetic testing and new reproductive technologies, celebrity tweeting and the feminization of social media.
One of the key aims within this diversity is to address the relationship between surveillance and inequality, broadly defined, something that requires more attention to the ways that surveillance affects populations typically overlooked in surveillance studies (such as Indigenous women and women of colour, sex work clients, and victims of domestic violence) as well as new tools and points of departure. The various authors draw from a wide range of disciplines, including media studies, history, sociology, cultural studies, critical criminology, and others. Not all the contributors would describe themselves as surveillance scholars. Rather, some consider how, or in what way, their respective analyses of their own areas of interest can inform, and be informed by, surveillance studies. For example, Dorothy Roberts’ contribution on ‘reprogenetics’ – the eugenic practices of prenatal genetic screening – and Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta’s chapter on transnational surrogacy blogs tend to treat surveillance as self-evident, and offer empirical and analytical examinations of the racialized and gendered implications of these surveillant practices for what Roberts terms the ‘new reproductive dystopia’ (p. 176). These contributions make clear that ‘the ways in which supposedly “neutral” technologies are used requires a feminist analysis to access issues of disenfranchisement’ (Dubrofsky and Magnet, p. 5).
Yet, as Dubrofsky and Magnet further argue in the Introduction, it is not just the ways that the tools of surveillance studies can be expanded to embrace neglected subject areas that makes the inclusion of a feminist analysis so urgent. It is also important to rethink what surveillance ‘does’, or the ways that surveillance practices ‘also remake the body, producing new ways of visualizing bodily identities’ (p. 9). Thus, on the other end of the spectrum, contributors such as Andrea Smith and Rachel Hall re-write the terrain of surveillance studies altogether. Drawing on indigenous feminist inquiry, Smith demonstrates that an analysis of the surveillance society requires the recognition that the contemporary settler state is also engaged in practices of not-seeing. Part of the process of not-seeing is the disappearance from surveillance studies of the history of gendered colonial violence that make the very modern, bureaucratic, surveillance state possible: ‘Indigenous feminism reshapes the manner in which we engage surveillance studies, demonstrating that focus on the surveillance strategies of the state obscure the fact that the state is itself a surveillance strategy’ (p. 31). Smith’s concept of not-seeing thus challenges and re-orients a surveillance studies that has been almost entirely concerned with visibility. As demonstrated below, this concept can be deployed in different ways within the emerging field of feminist surveillance studies.
Similarly reconstitutive of the ways we can understand surveillance, Rachel Hall’s analysis of body scanners and the ‘female grotesque’ articulates a theory of what Hall terms the ‘aesthetics of transparency’, defined ‘as an attempt by the security state to force a correspondence between interiority and exteriority on the objects of the preventative gaze or, better yet, to flatten the object of surveillance, thereby doing away with the problem of correspondence altogether’ (p. 128). Focusing on the introduction of full body scanners in US airports, Hall demonstrates the ways in which the security state renders ‘opacity’ dangerous and suspect in ways that are inherently racialized (for example, ‘any skin tone other than the whitest of white threatens to obscure the truth sought via the surveillant gaze’; p. 129). The flip side to the securitization of opacity is the emergence of a ‘transparency chic’, associated with the good (white, middle class, cis-gendered, able-bodied, unveiled, etc.) traveller who willingly submits to routine inspection. This ‘good’ traveler is also, Hall convincingly argues, a thoroughly gendered subject: in the same way that women are encouraged to see their own bodies as a constant work in progress to make themselves desirable (a project that non-white women are unlikely to be seen to succeed in), so too is the ‘good’ passenger expected to operate according to ‘a gendered model of reflexive governance, which defines itself in opposition to the female grotesque’ (p. 137). In this way, rather than incidental, Hall places a critical gendered subject at the centre of her analysis of national security and contemporary surveillance technologies. Gendered outcomes are not an (unintentional) effect of surveillance. Rather, surveillance is always-already gendered.
The real strength of the collection is that, although the 11 chapters may seem far apart – in subject area, approach, engagement with surveillance studies, and conclusions – they in fact build on one another, creating a dialogue and exchange that is lively and thought-provoking. Thus, Hall’s analysis of the female grotesque builds on the work of other contributors, such as Kelli Moore, whose analysis of the photographs of celebrity Rihanna’s domestic assaults illustrates the ways that women are situated as objects of scientific knowledge. Yet, at the same time, Moore also references Hall’s analysis, referring to Rihanna’s appearance on American news journalism show 20/20 to tell her own story of her domestic abuse as an example of the ‘aesthetics of transparency’ (p. 120). Similarly, Moore draws upon Smith’s analysis to show that police photographs of the domestic assault of racialized women is an instance of ‘not seeing’: ‘The performance of not-seeing that the camera flash enacts on skin color creates a visual code that organizes the regime of domestic-violence governmentality, centering a normalized female body that is white’, a practice that places non-white women at the ‘edge of juridical universality’ (p. 123).
This kind of in-volume referencing adds to the depth of the analysis provided by the book overall. On their own, and as a collection, the essays in Feminist Surveillance Studies offer an impressive array of empirically rich, theoretically engaged and critically-oriented contributions that should reshape the ways we do surveillance studies. Dubrofsky and Magnet are right to claim that their book will launch a new field of engagement. Feminist Surveillance Studies is a must-read for feminist and surveillance scholars alike.