Deadline: March 31^st 2008.

 

Kirstie Ball, Nicola Green, Hille Koskela, David J. Phillips

 

Since its inception, surveillance studies has highlighted how monitoring practices divide, classify, order and sort target populations. It has been argued not only that populations assigned to different categories are subjected to different intensities and kinds of surveillance, but also that surveillance itself is integral to the production of those populations.

 

With a few exceptions, gender and sexuality – as ubiquitous structuring principles in society – have been neglected within surveillance studies. The body and its desires, as they are invoked in mainstream surveillance studies, tend to be assumed rather than specified.  In this special issue of Surveillance and Society, we are therefore interested in explicitly examining the relations among gender, sexuality, and surveillance. Hence, this issue foregrounds and highlights how the gaze is gendered and sexualized, how surveillance is experienced across populations, and how the construction of subjectivities and bodies via surveillance practices invokes gender and sexuality. Moreover, we hope to consider how feminist and queer theories might be used to understand and explain surveillance practices, and to highlight debates about the technocentrism associated with surveillance studies. Surveillance studies is itself historically constructed by male theorists, and it is notable that key feminist works that focus on discipline, subjectivity, power and the body [such as that of Bordo (1989, 1993), Butler (1990), McNay (1992), Ramazanoglu (ed, 1993) and Sawicki (1991)] remain marginal within the field. We therefore ask whether feminist or queer thought may also impact and reconstruct the concepts and theories of surveillance studies itself. 

 

Contributions are welcome on any of the following themes, which might include, but are not limited to:

 

• the surveillance of women/men
• the construction of normative gender and sexual identities
• exhibitionism, voyeurism, desire and surveillance technologies
• vulnerability & exposure, border/ boundary movement and violation
• surveillance and the body
• gender & medical surveillance - biotechnologies, reproductive technologies, alcohol & addiction
• feminist theory, the panopticon and power
• queer theory, normativity and power
• gender-based identification, identity, subjectivity and discipline
• surveillance and sexual subcultures
• gendering the watchers & the watched
• discourses of masculinity, femininity, hetero-normativity and surveillance

 

Full papers, research notes, reviews, opinion pieces, art and poetry submissions should be sent electronically to Emily Smith ([log in to unmask]) by 31^st March 2008.

 

Bibliography:

 

Bordo, S. (1989) “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault.” In Alison M. Jaggar and Susan Bordo (eds). Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press: pp. 13-33.

 

Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body Berkley: University of California Press

 

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

 

McNay, L. (1992) Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self. Cambridge: Blackwell, Polity Press.

 

Ramazanoglu, C. (ed)(1993) Up Against Foucault: explorations of some tensions between Foucault and feminism London: Routledge.

 

Sawicki, J. (1991) Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body New York: Routledge.

 

 

Address for Submissions 

Surveillance & Society Editorial Assistant, Emily Smith

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