Feminist Surveillance Studies

by Rachel E. Dubrofsky (Editor), Shoshana Amielle Magnet (Editor)

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 Anaïs, 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

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Feminism

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2015

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 TV: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.

Reviews

[Zara Rahman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book on a topic I've never seen covered before in such detail. The book is very much targeted at an academic audience though, and largely framed within the North American context. Despite this, many of the core ideas and principles would be relevant within other societies, and though it's not a light read, I would definitely recommend it.

[E Money The Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievably insightful. Had to come back to this (5 years later!) after another text clicked something in my mind.

Broken down by chapters. Each with its own researcher and topic that, when taken together, paints a bleak (awful) image of a world dominated by what bell hooks labels “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

Here are a few snippets:

1) “Effects of the strengthened anti-domestic violence legislation is that battered women kill their abusers less frequently; however, batterers do not. … With mandatory arrest laws, police officers frequently arrest those being battered rather than batterers.”

Why would they not cause more rather than less harm? Policing is inherently patriarchal.

2) “Gendered surveillance accomplished through birth certificates means that bodies must reinforce the socially and culturally mandated binary sex characteristics.”

State apparatus requires permanence in identification. Human beings are thus static forms, never becoming, in its eyes. While this is a problem for everyone, our trans and NB friends obviously suffer a *major* problem.

3) “‘Our Bump!’ Below these words is a striking image: a brown-skinned pregnant woman, swathed in sparkling silver and pink sari, her protruding abdomen the focus of the photograph, her face conspicuously absent.”

There is an industry propped up by rich white western couples who are unable to, or just don’t want to, have (as in carry to term) children who will have their DNA gestationally carried by women in underprivileged countries. So they have these companies (yay capitalism!) that have their babies for them.

These brown women, “surrogates,” are thus only viewed as headless baby makers. They are often chained to a bed for 9 months, the violence against them apparent even in the advertising of these companies, but ignored by the privileged customer.

4) “Institutional ethnography can be extended to productively enrich feminist surveillance studies” and “is not a tool one can use without adopting a Marxist feminist materialist perspective.”