FEMINIST SURVEILLANCE STUDIES

FEMINIST
SURVEILLANCE
STUDIES

RACHEL E. DUBROFSKY AND

SHOSHANA AMIELLE MAGNET, EDITORS

Duke University Press Durham and London 2015

© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾

Designed by Natalie F. Smith

Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Feminist surveillance studies / Rachel E. Dubrofsky and
Shoshana Amielle Magnet, editors.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5920-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5892-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7546-3 (e-book)
1. Feminism—United States. 2. Feminist theory. 3. Electronic
surveillance—Social aspects—United States. 4. Government
information—United States. 5. Internal security—United
States. I. Dubrofsky, Rachel E. II. Magnet, Shoshana.
hq1426.f4735 2015
305.420973—dc23 2014045006

Dorothy E. Roberts’s chapter, “Race, Gender, and Genetic

Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?,” was previously
printed in Signs 34, no. 4 (summer 2009): 783–804. Copyright
University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission of the
publisher.

Cover art: Design by Natalie F. Smith.

 CONTENTS

Foreword, ix
Mark Andrejevic

Acknowledgments, xix

Introduction, 1
Feminist Surveillance Studies: Critical Interventions
Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet

PART I. SURVEILLANCE AS FOUNDATIONAL STRUCTURE

1. Not-­Seeing, 21
State Surveillance, Settler Colonialism, and Gender Violence
Andrea Smith

2. Surveillance and the Work of Antitrafficking, 39

From Compulsory Examination to International Coordination
Laura Hyun Yi Kang

3. Legally Sexed, 58
Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens
Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah
 PART II. THE VISUAL AND SURVEILLANCE: BODIES ON DISPLAY

4. Violating In/Visibilities, 79
Honor Killings and Interlocking Surveillance(s)
Yasmin Jiwani

5. Gender, Race, and Authenticity, 93

Celebrity Women Tweeting for the Gaze
Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood

6. Held in the Light, 107

Reading Images of Rihanna’s Domestic Abuse
Kelli D. Moore

PART III. BIOMETRIC TECHNOLOGIES AS SURVEILLANCE ASSEMBLAGES

7. Terror and the Female Grotesque, 127

Introducing Full-­Body Scanners to U.S. Airports
Rachel Hall

8. The Public Fetus and the Veiled Woman, 150

Transnational Surrogacy Blogs as Surveillant Assemblage
Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

9. Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies, 169

A New Reproductive Dystopia?
Dorothy E. Roberts
PART IV. TOWARD A FEMINIST PRAXIS IN SURVEILLANCE STUDIES

10. Antiprostitution Feminism and the

Surveillance of Sex Industry Clients, 189
Ummni Khan

11. Research Methods, Institutional Ethnography,

and Feminist Surveillance Studies, 208
Kevin Walby and Seantel Anaïs

Afterword, 221
Blaming, Shaming, and the Feminization of Social Media
Lisa Nakamura

References, 229

Contributors, 265

Index, 271
 FOREWORD

MARK ANDREJEVIC

If in the physical environment the pressing issue of the next several de-
cades (and beyond) is likely to be the dramatic transformation of the
global climate, in the social realm (to the extent that it can be distin-
guished from the physical environment), the main issue will be the shift-
ing surveillance climate. I don’t think this is overstating the case: in the
areas of politics, economics, commerce, policing, finance, warfare, and
beyond, social practices are being transformed by dramatic develop-
ments in information collection, storage, and processing, as well as by
various techniques of watching, broadly construed. The occasional anec-
dote about the power of new forms of data monitoring and mining—the
retail outlet that learned a young woman was pregnant before she told
her family, the ability of mobile phone use to predict whether someone is
coming down with the flu, the use of license-­plate readers to reconstruct
people’s whereabouts—are only tiny foretastes of the automated, multi-
dimensional forms of surveillance to come.
We are at a moment in time when we can start to see the surveillant
imaginary expand vertiginously, thanks in part to the new avenues for
monitoring opened up by technologies that “interact” with us in a grow-
ing variety of ways and involve a wide range of senses and sensors, and
also to the increasingly sophisticated techniques for putting to use the
huge amounts of data these devices, applications, and platforms cap-
ture and store. Intimations of a megadata world are starting to multi-
ply: Edward Snowden’s revelations about blanket U.S. National Security
Agency (nsa) surveillance, media coverage of the huge databases being
amassed by companies like Facebook and Google, and the proliferation
of data centers across the landscape, including the nsa’s giant complex
in Utah. It is a moment that requires reflection on what is at stake in
the seemingly inevitable slide into a monitored, digitally redoubled life.
This volume represents a defining moment in that process of reflection—
the cultivation of a critical imagination that keeps pace with the techno-
logical developments and their associated practices in reach, scope, and
depth, but counters the ahistorical rhetoric of the digital sublime (Mosco
2004) with a deep sensitivity to suppressed historical continuities and
antecedents.
This book provides several useful explorations of the meaning of the
term surveillance, but perhaps the most simple and generic is that it is
the coupling of information collection and use with power. We are living
in a time when information is becoming an increasingly transformative
force, and power is never absent. In other words, the information “revo-
lution” (in the ironically depoliticized sense in which it is so often in-
voked), viewed through the lens of power, is perhaps better reconcep-
tualized as a surveillance one. If late twentieth-­century preoccupations
with power were atomic and ballistic, those of the twenty-­first century
are increasingly informatic. Fantasies of jetpacks and passenger trips to
the moon have largely (but not entirely) given way to ones about new
forms of informatization, representation, and interaction. The threat of
“the bomb” is complemented by that of a “cyber-­Pearl Harbor” (Bumiller
and Shanker 2012). We are becoming more preoccupied with novel ways
of giving wings to our surveillance devices, sensors, probes (and “smart”
weapons) than to ourselves. A fascination with the industrial-­era power
of turbines and rocket ships is supplemented by the information-­era fan-
tasy of total information awareness.
It is against this background that surveillance emerges as a pressing
topic of study for the foreseeable future. And at this point, it is the re-
search object itself that defines the field—not a methodology, not even a
theoretical canon or a developed, shared set of terms and concerns. This
collection both confirms such an observation and qualifies it, for it works
in the direction of defining a particular set of approaches and issues, spe-

x Mark Andrejevic
cifically bringing to bear methodologies and interests based on intersec-
tional feminist commitments and theories. The study of surveillance is,
of necessity, a study of power relations, and while it might be possible to
attempt to adopt a disinterested, neutral or “administrative” stance to
such an endeavor, the studies presented here suggest the disingenuous
or complicit character of any such attempt. As Kevin Walby and Seantel
Anais put it in their contribution to this collection, a feminist approach
is concerned with getting away from neutral definitions of surveillance
and putting critique first in order to continually point out “how ruling re-
lations are enabled by the texts and classifications that make up surveil-
lance” (220). The study of surveillance is also, as this collection points out,
a recursive endeavor, at least insofar as research is also a form of moni-
toring and therefore implicated in the relations of power being examined,
as Ummni Khan makes clear in her contribution. As in other instances,
what is seen or registered is as important as what is exempted from or
obscured by the monitoring gaze.
One of the central themes that emerge from this collection is an en-
gagement with what has been, in one way or another, overlooked or ob-
scured in the emerging formation of surveillance studies. At the most
basic level, this includes the wide-­ranging scope of what ought to be
counted as surveillance, especially those monitoring practices that at-
tempt to exempt themselves from an entanglement with power or to cloak
themselves in taken-­for-­granted imperatives. If technologies like cctv
(closed-­circuit television) cameras, drones, and wiretapping lend them-
selves to an already well-­conditioned response to the prospect of state
surveillance, the perspectives included in the following pages expand and
reconfigure the scope of research to include techniques and technologies
that might otherwise fly below the radar of surveillance studies: genetic
screening in fertility clinics, photographic evidence of domestic violence,
images of babies in the womb, birth certificates, security screening, Twit-
ter practices, and the other seemingly mundane forms of data collection,
observation, entertainment, and sorting that increasingly characterize
daily life in informated and technologized societies.
This volume explores the ways in which techniques conventionally rele-
gated to the realm of monitoring and documentation—but not surveil-
lance proper—mask and reinforce the gendered, sexed, raced, and classed
exercise of power. The ambit of surveillance studies is thereby reconfig-
ured to move beyond the field’s more “traditional” focus and its historical
ties to sociology’s twentieth-­century concern with criminology. Rather, it

Foreword xi
sets out to explore the ways in which a concern with forms of governance
and regulation extends into those practices that assume the guise of sci-
entific neutrality, bureaucratic record keeping, or the largely unexamined
social imperatives of securitization, efficiency, risk management, produc-
tivity, and reproductivity. There is no neutral record keeping—all forms
of data collection have imperatives built in—and the power of the work
assembled here lies in disembedding and exposing these imperatives, the
interests they serve, and the uses they enable.
The initiative represented by this volume is a timely one for the for-
mation of surveillance studies, a formation whose object is increasingly
engulfed by what might be described, on the one hand, as the alleged neu-
trality of the machine (or the algorithm) and, on the other, as the various
alibis of security, efficiency, entertainment, and convenience. Consider,
for example, Google’s protest in response to Microsoft’s “Scroogled” cam-
paign, which criticizes the search-­engine giant’s business model of target-
ing advertising based on (among other things) the content of users’ email
messages. Google countered Microsoft’s accusations of privacy invasion
by noting, “No humans read your email or Google account information in
order to show you advertisements or related information” (D. Kerr 2013).
It is a telling protest insofar as it frames the issue of monitoring quite spe-
cifically: what counts as intrusive is not the uses to which information is
being put (a topic Google’s response dodges), but the prospect of another
human poking his or her nose into one’s personal correspondence. By
contrast, the algorithm carries with it the promise of automated neu-
trality, a machinic “disinterest” that simply operates in the service of con-
venience, customization, and efficiency (as well as a hint of blackmail:
“Wouldn’t you rather see ads relevant to you than be bombarded by those
that aren’t?”). We are invited to place ourselves and our faith in the in-
different hands of the algorithm. In the face of such an invitation, one
pressing task for surveillance studies (understood as a critical engage-
ment with the relationship between power and information collection)
is to excavate the various interests, pressures, prejudices, and agendas
obscured by the technocratic alibi of the algorithm and its analogs—that
is, those forms of control that operate in the name of security, efficiency,
risk management, and so on, while simultaneously obscuring the forms
of gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized discrimination they advance
in the name of an allegedly general interest.
There may be aspects of novelty in the expanding role of the algorithm,
but one of the lessons of this collection is that there is also a deep sense

xii Mark Andrejevic
of continuity ranging across those forms of surveillance that take place
in the name of information-­based rationalization or, perhaps even less
extravagantly, those that are portrayed as benign, or as entertaining, or
even as activist forms of monitoring. Another lesson that emerges in this
volume is the importance of focusing not only on the specter of “abuse”
or “misuse” of monitoring technologies and practices, but on their proper
use and the implications. The prevailing form of misdirection about the
information society mobilized by various pundits, publicists, and flaks
is their emphasis on what counts as abuse (identity theft, fraud, data
breaches, and so on), which works to deflect attention away from con-
cerns about emergent uses. Focus on these abuses (as important as they
may be) backgrounds the “normal” functioning of data collection and use
as taken-­for-­granted—that is, as non-­abusive. The important message
that recurs across the essays in this collection is that the sanctioned uses
of the surveillance technology in question—whether for the express pur-
poses of safety, health, marketing, security, entertainment, or protec-
tion—require further investigation and interrogation.
Neutrality is the ruse of the algorithm, which, as some of the con-
tributors here demonstrate, does not emerge full-­blown, independent of
human intervention, but often incorporates the prejudices of “domain
specific” expertise and historical patterns of data collection. Data collec-
tion is no more neutral than the algorithm, at least until the (impossible)
ideal of a fully recorded life is achieved—and even then, that life must be
disaggregated and reassembled if it is to be compared, sorted, and mined.
At the same time, the algorithm raises the specter of new and reconfig-
ured forms of discrimination based on the emergent and opaque charac-
ter of data mining.
Relatively crude forms of red-­lining, for example, had the exploitable
weakness of being discernible and attributable to established forms of
discrimination and prejudice. Data mining offers the prospect of recon-
figuring and obscuring these forms of discrimination in ways that are dif-
ficult to discern or reverse-­engineer. If a particular configuration of vari-
ables adds up to a prediction—that someone is a “person of interest,” an
undesirable employee, a credit risk—that prediction does not necessarily
come with any assumed underlying explanation: it passes itself off as free
of preconceptions, as simply the numbers speaking for themselves. Thus,
the prospect offered up by data mining is that of a reorganized range of
categories of discrimination—that is, new proxies for use in sorting and
predicting. While it may be illegal to discriminate, for example, on the

Foreword xiii
basis of protected categories for a particular job, the data mine promises
new correlations that can serve as opaque alibis, deflecting attempts to
demonstrate the links between employment decisions and ethnicity, sex,
race, gender, and class. The data can be queried in more specific terms:
what is the probability that a particular job candidate will take an ex-
tended leave of paid absence, that a prospective student will become a
cash donor on graduation, that someone will default on a loan, or that
someone will need to be hospitalized? While such questions might be—
and have been—amenable to traditional forms of discrimination, data
mining promises to generate predictions based on correlations and pat-
terns that cannot be anticipated. This is not to say that ethnicity, class,
sex, gender, race, and sexuality will not be implicated, but rather that
their roles will be potentially obscured and reconfigured by the range of
variables under consideration and the complexity of the correlations on
which the algorithm draws. Put in somewhat different terms, the poten-
tial threat of data mining lies in the ability to disaggregate discrimination
based on more granular sets of attributes. Rather than being broad cate-
gories that generalize about employability, insurability, credit risk, secu-
rity threat, and so on, data-­based categories can be more finely sliced and
reconfigured to, on the one hand, obscure connections to historical forms
of discrimination and, on the other, to reassemble groups that are subject
to sorting, targeting, and exclusion.
Dorothy Roberts’s essay in this collection notes the way in which, for
example, new regimes of targeting and customization underwrite the
trend of race-­based targeting of pharmaceuticals. As Roberts points out,
such developments threaten to resuscitate debunked theories about the
biological character of race. At the same time, however, they point in
the direction of the disaggregation and reassembly of target groups: not
just black patients, but black patients with a heart condition. One might
imagine the addition of further variables, some drawn from historical
criteria for exploitation, others representing new forms of targeting and
specialization (working-­class black patients with heart conditions who
live in a particular neighborhood, engage in particular types of activities,
and so on).
As in the case of other forms of sorting and discrimination, even as
data mining promises to become more granular and targeted, it simul-
taneously subsumes individuals to population-­level claims. As one de-
scription of data mining in a commercial context put it, “I can’t tell you
what one shopper is going to do, but I can tell you with 90 percent accu-

xiv Mark Andrejevic
racy what one shopper is going to do if he or she looks exactly like one
million other shoppers” (Nolan 2012). The claim of data mining is that
these predictions are based purely on statistical correlations and not on
underlying preconceptions. In actuality, as Shoshana Amielle Magnet has
compellingly illustrated in her work on biometric technologies, biases,
preconceptions, and prejudices can be baked into the code, where they
continue to operate in opaque ways. Magnet explores how debunked con-
ceptions of race are incorporated into facial recognition technology: “As
these scientists label the images according to their understanding of their
own biological race and gender identities, preconceptions about gender
and race are codified into the biometric scanners from the beginning”
(2011, 46). Perhaps one of the giveaways is the difficulty algorithms have
in predicting what count as rare and exceptional occurrences—that is to
say, historical understandings of what is “to be expected” have a way of
working themselves into the algorithm.
A world in which preconceptions, biases, and prejudices are coded into
the decision-­making infrastructure poses new challenges for attempts to
intervene in the network of shared meanings. We might describe this out-
come in terms of the autonomization of preconceptions and prejudices:
because the symbolic processing power has migrated into the algorithm
that effectively shapes the decisions that govern everyday life—who gets
hired or approved for a loan, who can cross the border and who cannot,
who will be targeted, monitored, included or excluded in a variety of con-
texts—we are invited to imagine that we have somehow moved beyond
the constructed assumptions, prejudices, biases, and “truths” that shape
its operation. By the same token, we are invited to adopt an external rela-
tionship to the efficacy of such preconceptions: disavowing them in daily
life while they continue to do their work behind the screen of the inter-
face.
Consider, for example, the way new technologies promise to “see” for
their users. The wearable interface, most recently revived by Google Glass,
offers to bring “knowledge” beyond what the viewer already knows to
what the viewer sees by, for example, recognizing people for the wearer,
accessing information about them and sharing it with the wearer, such
that the wearer’s gaze is mediated by the information retrieved from the
database. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab’s Sixth-
Sense system represents a similar attempt to superimpose wirelessly
accessed digital information on the physical world. People can tag par-
ticular locations with specific information (reviews for a restaurant or

Foreword xv
a movie theater and so on), which can then be accessed by others view-
ing the same location. The technology provides a suggestive metaphor
for the fact that our gaze is never unmediated, innocent, or free of pre-
conceptions, background knowledge, and information. Even without the
high-­tech interface, the physical world is already overlaid with the infor-
mation the viewer brings to it. Imagine the ways in which such devices
might be used by, say, police: forms of background profiling and threat
detection might be incorporated into the system so as to categorize each
individual as he or she walks by. The result is the automation of shared
“knowledge” and preconceptions. That is, a superimposed assessment be-
comes the result of forms of data processing that take place behind our
backs, somewhere in the “cloud” from which the information we are see-
ing is accessed.
The shared information then comes to serve as a kind of prosthetic
collective unconscious—although the process that generates it remains
unavailable to viewers, this information nevertheless helps to shape their
understanding of the surrounding world. This logic is not dissimilar to
that of search engines like Google, which shape the user’s experience of
the informational world online. When people embark on a search, they
see results that are generated by algorithmic logics that remain opaque
to them: the results look almost “natural”—the obvious response to a
particular search term or query. However, the algorithms that shape the
information available to users are developed with a particular set of im-
peratives in mind, including the goals of attracting and retaining users in
an environment conducive to Google’s commercial interests.
In some contexts the workings of the algorithm are made partially
transparent to users—as in the case of Amazon.com’s book recommen-
dations, which allow users to see which past purchases or searches have
resulted in a particular book being suggested. For the most part, how-
ever, the workings of the algorithm are opaque and are likely to become
increasingly so for two reasons. First, the advent of mining “big data”—
the unprecedented size of contemporary databases and the emerg-
ing techniques for making sense of them (Andrejevic and Gates 2014,
186)—­results in algorithms whose results defy explanation or render it
superfluous. Someone who buys a particular model of car may be highly
likely to be politically conservative, but there is no clear underlying or
causal explanation—the pattern is purely correlational. Second, those
who control the database and the algorithm have little incentive to make
the basis of algorithmic decision making available, not least because this

xvi Mark Andrejevic
would entail revealing the increasingly powerful forms of monitoring and
surveillance on which they are based.
The development of digital monitoring demonstrates the generaliza-
tion of the logic unpacked in this volume: unacknowledged biases that
underwrite dominant power relations work their way into myriad forms
of monitoring and documentation. Thus, the direction in which surveil-
lance is headed will require resources that draw on an intersectional ex-
ploration of the ways in which forms of exclusion, discrimination, and
sorting are built into the taken-­for-­granted norms that guide the moni-
toring process. Suppressed or overlooked histories of surveillance prac-
tices provide crucial guides for navigating this unfolding surveillance-­
scape, in which all forms of monitoring are encompassed by the embrace
of power. It is the attention to these norms and the suppressed forms
of exclusion and coercion they incorporate that provides crucial avenues
for debunking the neutrality of the algorithm and the “completeness” of
the database. Similarly, the excavation of suppressed histories helps shed
light on what has become all too easy to overlook in the contemporary
exercise of surveillance.
Additionally, this collection interrogates and undermines the invoca-
tion of the notion of an abstract “we” in the face of surveillance tech-
nologies that disaggregate, reconfigure, and sort populations according
to a growing range of variables. The obliviousness embedded in this in-
vocation finds its expression in the notorious response of Google ceo
Eric Schmidt to concerns about the surveillant character of his company’s
business: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,
maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” (Metz 2009). The for-
mulation seeks to defuse concerns by conflating random strangers (“any-
one”) with the real cause of concern: entities both public and private with
the power to intervene in ways that affect the life chances of “you,” who is
likely to be someone other than Schmidt, a fabulously wealthy, straight,
white, male, U.S. citizen who can imagine he has the luxury of being
blithely unconcerned about the monitoring practices he describes (and
benefits from). The charge of “something to hide” transfers the blame
for the threat of discrimination, exclusion, and exploitation faced by
those differently situated than Schmidt onto the victims: what happens
to them is a result of something nefarious they must be hiding. Or, tauto-
logically, if they suffer adverse effects, these must be directly attributable
to something about them that is wrong, underhanded, or otherwise de-
viant. Schmidt’s public embrace of willing submission to comprehensive

Foreword xvii
monitoring drives home Rachel Hall’s observation in this collection that
transparency is effectively the new white.
Google, obviously, is not some diary-­invading kid brother or a nosy
neighbor, but one of the planet’s most powerful private corporations
and subject to the subpoena powers of one of its most powerful states—
a state which has embarked on widespread monitoring of the population
and asserted its right to summarily execute its own citizens in certain cir-
cumstances. This is not to say that Schmidt should be concerned himself,
but rather that his facile generalization does not take into account the
concerns of those differently situated, of those who bear the brunt of the
approved uses of surveillance (and not the “abuses” about which Schmidt
is certainly as concerned as the next corporate executive). More point-
edly, it is to highlight that the temptation to “convince ourselves that
vulnerability is equally distributed” (Smith 2010, 8) is limited to those
in Schmidt’s privileged position. Something similar might be said of the
temptation to write in terms of an assumed “we” who are subject to the
monitoring gaze, a temptation that itself defines a particular position
with regard to emerging surveillance practices. This collection provides a
potent reminder of the fact that such a “we” is not to be taken for granted,
but rather to be understood as the site of ongoing political struggle.
In developing a feminist set of methodologies and concerns, the pieces
in this collection provide a crucial contemporary critical perspective on
what counts for surveillance and what counts as surveillance. It turns out
that in both cases the answer is much broader than has been sufficiently
addressed by either contemporary debates or academic research. This col-
lection goes a long way toward remedying such omissions and will serve
as an important turning point in the critical study of one of the defining
practices of the digital age.

xviii Mark Andrejevic
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We begin by thanking Megan M. Wood: there are no words to convey our

gratitude. Simply put, Megan was a lifesaver. She stepped in when we
absolutely could not have managed without her. The timely and efficient
completion of this volume is due to Megan’s hard work and dedication.
She was tireless in her devotion to the project, putting up with our endless
last-­minute rush requests and doing everything with good humor and the
kind of efficiency we fear we will not encounter again. Amazingly, she did
this because of her belief in the project and her incredible desire to learn,
since we were unable to provide any material compensation. Amid all the
busywork, Megan was also able to parse through complex theory and see
the forest for the trees, helping guide us when we got lost. Her mark is on
every page of this work.
We would like to thank Kelly Gates for her wonderful suggestions and
insights in a review of an early draft of the manuscript—her input shaped
the project. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewer who provided
many invaluable suggestions for the work. Courtney Berger, our editor at
Duke, has shepherded us through this process, always supportive, amaz-
ingly encouraging and wise, and, of course, patient. To Erin Hanas, the
editorial associate at Duke, we are grateful for always keeping on top of
things, and particularly, in the final stages, for working tirelessly to make
sure this project was completed in a timely fashion. And, of course, we
are hugely indebted to our contributors, whose brilliance shapes this vol-
ume. They are real troopers for putting up with our repeated requests for
revisions (big and small): you are an amazing bunch.
It is with a tremendous debt of gratitude that I (Shoshana) thank my
coeditor and friend Rachel. During the last year of our work, I faced a
particularly challenging time in my own life. When I turned to Rachel for
help, she gave tirelessly of her own time and compassionate energy, taking
over tasks when I could not do them, completing them with a generosity
of spirit and kindness and with the brilliance for which her scholarship
is known. This edited book would not exist without her many and pro-
found interventions. In addition, Rachel is one of the most thoughtful
and innovative thinkers that I know—the chance to speak with her about
the many ideas in this project has been an incredibly rich intellectual ex-
perience. A special thanks also to Simone Browne, who helped greatly
with much of the early thinking and ideas for this collection.
As always, I (Shoshana) remain well supported by a generous and gen-
erative set of thinkers at my home institution at the University of Ottawa.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my colleague and B.F.F. Michael
Orsini (and his family: Victoria Gordon Orsini, Emma Orsini, and Lucca
Orsini). It actually brings tears to my eyes to think back on the many ways
that he has supported me both personally and professionally. He remains
one of the most widely read, intellectually stimulating, brilliant people
that I know, and it was conversations with him that fueled many of the
suggestions that I had early on when Rachel and I were writing the intro-
duction. In addition, with him as chair, the Institute of Feminist and Gen-
der Studies at the University of Ottawa is a truly wonderful place to work.
His intersectional feminist analysis and his admirable leadership and com-
radeship have made coming into work a joy. Just as my pal Michael has
changed my life, the same goes for my pals Miranda Brady, Jena McGill,
and Cynthia Misener. I simply don’t know what I’d do without them. They
are rich sources of scholarly inspiration, but they also provided the incred-
ibly depthful friendship I needed to do any work at all. So did Sarah Berry,
Meghan Dailey, Jesse Dangerously, Danielle Dinovelli-­Lang, Pat Gentille,
Sarah Kennell, Jackie Kennelly, Ummni Khan, Evelyn Maeder, Mireille
McLaughlin, and my dear “goddess­mother” Diana Ma­jury. As always,
for Helen Kang and Shanta Varma and my mothers, Sanda Rodgers and
Sheila McIntyre, without whom life would simply not exist as I know it.
And for my truly wonderful partner Lise Richard, whose scintillating and

xx Acknowledgments
brilliant presence has completely transformed my life in all the loveliest
ways possible. There are no words to convey the absolutely huge depth of
my love and appreciation for these five members of my family. I would
also like to cite my other generous feminist colleagues and friends, includ-
ing Corrie Scott, Mythili Rajiva, and Kathryn Trevenen, who have shaped
and continue to shape my thinking, including about the ways that we
might continue to push intersectional feminist analysis. Finally, I’d espe-
cially like to thank my students both past and present, who furnished
me with incredible ideas for thinking about surveillance intersectionally:
Caitlin Campisi and Dayna Prest (who both still understand more about
methodology than I do), Hayley Crooks, JoAnne Gordon, Jami McFar-
land, Brittany Neron, Celeste Orr, Chaya Porter, Victoria Sands, Jenna
Tenn-­Yuk, and, of course, Amanda Watson. These are among our finest
feminist thinkers, as well as some of the kindest and most generous and
generative scholars and activists I know. Although it sounds like a truism,
they actually teach me so much more than I teach them.
I (Rachel) am honored to be a part of this project, which was Sho-
shana’s baby—I came along for the ride. Working with Shoshana was
the kind of collaborative, productive, and generative experience schol-
ars hope for. She welcomed my input, letting me make an imprint on
the work, and eventually encouraging me to take the lead. Her grace and
generosity of spirit guided the entire project. Shoshana’s work has always
been a wonderful inspiration for my own work: I am lucky to share an
author line with her.
I (Rachel) am indebted to my professional home, the Department of
Communication at the University of South Florida, for the support pro-
vided for this project through course releases and research assistants,
thanks to my department chairs, Kenneth Cissna and later Carolyn Ellis,
who believed in the value of the project. A word of thanks to my friends in
Tampa who sustained me with endless laughter and good times, enabling
me to get back to the work: Julie Alexander, Warren L. Rose, Chaim Noy,
Ruthie Brathwaite, Ambar Basu, Mahuya Pal, and Mariaelena Bartesaghi.
Grateful to Kent A. Ono, who inspires and provides wisdom every step
of the way, and to Marlene Kadar, the first to insist I begin this academic
journey, and who has been there at every turn, beaming her encourage-
ment. Finally, words fail to express my appreciation for my mother Debby
Dubrofsky, who is the most loving, vibrant, and lively cheerleader one can
hope for, and for my little sister, Seiyan Yang, whose emergence into young
adulthood inspires and reminds me why I do what I do: to impress her.

Acknowledgments xxi
 INTRODUCTION

FEMINIST SURVEILLANCE STUDIES

Critical Interventions

RACHEL E. DUBROFSKY AND SHOSHANA AMIELLE MAGNET

At a recent roundtable of academics and privacy advocates discussing

surveillance studies and inequality, the conversation variously turned
to consumer surveillance, new technologies, and the weakened legisla-
tive climate on privacy in both the United States and Canada. While we
share the interests of the discussants, we wonder at the place of feminist
concerns about surveillance and issues of inequality. For instance, where
were the presentations on the use of surveillance technologies by abusers
to stalk their intimate partners, the surveillance of disability through the
scrutiny of women on sick leave using Twitter and Facebook, the use of
surveillance images of women in popular entertainment media, or the
importance of penal abolition to surveillance studies given the surveil-
lance and criminalization of women of color (the fastest growing demo-
graphic to be included in the prison industrial complex)?
In considering roundtables like these and conversations in surveil-
lance studies generally, we feel the need for a feminist intervention into
the burgeoning field of surveillance studies. Our book formally launches
the area of feminist surveillance studies. The essays collected here do the
groundbreaking work of bringing the insights of critical scholarship and
feminist theory to surveillance studies, a field which has yet to fully bene-
fit from major feminist interventions. By the same token, we address a
gap in critical feminist scholarship, a field that has not explicitly taken
as a focus an examination of the implications of a rapidly expanding sur-
veillance society.
Briefly, implicit in most understandings of surveillance is the idea of
real people being watched, often unknowingly, doing real things. The term
surveillance is generally used to identify a systematic and focused manner
of observing, or in the words of David Lyon, “any collection and process-
ing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purposes of in-
fluencing or managing those whose data have been garnered” (2001a, 2).
Michel Foucault (1995) emphasized the productive potential of surveil-
lance as a technology of statecraft—one by which the state produces the
docile bodies essential to its functioning. In particular, he noted that this
form of state scrutiny is not only the province of external forms of polic-
ing, but also of the internalized systems of discipline by which people
come to police themselves. This form of internalized surveillance is often
captured by the spatial landscape of the Panopticon, where prisoners are
clustered around a guard tower in which they cannot see whether or not
they are being watched (the guard may not be looking in their direction,
or there may in fact be no guard in the tower). As a result, they learn
to behave as if they are always under surveillance, since they can never
know whether or not they are being scrutinized. Other useful descrip-
tions of surveillance emphasize its broad aims, defining it as the “col-
lection and analysis of information about populations in order to gov-
ern their activities”—a collection of information that is disaggregated
and decentralized—a “surveillant assemblage” rather than a singular Big
Brother (Haggerty and Ericson 2006, 8).
This collection highlights the contributions that scholarship on sur-
veillance has made (and can make) to the fields of feminist theory, criti-
cal race theory, critical cultural studies, communication theory, media
studies, critical criminology, and critical legal studies. We also emphasize
the long-­standing and existing roots these areas of study have in sur-
veillance studies, even though these have not always been labeled and
recognized formally as such. Part of the contribution of our project is to
show that surveillance should be of wide disciplinary concern for critical
scholars, and that it has in fact been an enduring concern in much exist-
ing scholarship in terms of gendered, sexualized, raced, and classed rep-
resentations of bodies, including work committed to ending the institu-
tions that facilitate criminalization. By drawing together disparate fields
and placing the burgeoning field of surveillance studies in historical per-

2 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet

spective, we find that surveillance is not a new phenomenon. In its most
basic structure, the act of surveillance has always existed in some form as
the action of observing or the condition of being observed, and has been
theorized across disciplines—including ones that do not appear to explic-
itly engage questions of surveillance.
What are the implications of thinking about concerns related to sur-
veillance specifically as critical feminist concerns using a feminist praxis?
What new objects might this theoretical and methodological focus bring
into view? The contributions to this volume are by no means exhaustive
of the topics a critical feminist approach to surveillance can cover. This
collection offers one possible approach to doing this kind of work, and
we hope that it serves as a jumping off point for future scholarship. We
group the chapters into thematic sections, ones that highlight the porous
boundaries that exist in the study of surveillance, as the concerns raised
by the authors overlap in so many important and rich ways—whether by
theorizing the foundational structures of surveillance to examine specific
instances of the scrutiny of individual bodies (Smith and Jiwani, this vol-
ume) or whether through an examination of particular bodies that helps
to reveal the reliance of surveillance on deep structures of inequality (Du-
brofsky and Wood, Moore and Currah, this volume). Nonetheless, the
groupings help emphasize key themes in the collection.

Toward a Feminist Praxis in Surveillance Studies

Part of our task is recuperative: to point out that there has been work on
surveillance done by feminists for quite some time. As well, we take as our
charge to highlight areas where a focus on surveillance requires explicit
attention to critical feminist concerns. The “critical” part of our project—
which should be understood hereafter as implicit in our use of the term
feminist—hails from a critical tradition that has at its core an activist and
interventionist agenda, and a questioning of the taken-­for-­granted, of
what is often mundane and seamless, with a profound sense that what
goes unquestioned can be dangerous, particularly for disenfranchised
bodies. Our critical feminist approach involves a feminist praxis that
centers intersectionality. We argue that surveillance is inseparable from
what feminist theorist Sherene Razack (1998) calls interlocking oppres-
sions, ones that are often integral to the structures that underlie our cul-
ture. We understand a feminist praxis to “highlight the interaction be-
tween theory and practice that is greater than the sum of those two parts”

Introduction 3
(Mahraj 2010, 17). A feminist praxis is not limited to gender issues, but
rather sees gender as part and parcel of a number of contingent issues,
such as race, sexuality, class, and able- and disabled-­bodiedness, insisting
that these cannot be viewed in isolation. Each essay in this volume ex-
hibits a feminist praxis in its approach to the study of surveillance.
How we engage questions related to surveillance—and what can be
left out in these articulations—is a key concern in this volume. For in-
stance, we’ve seen scholarly trends toward an analysis of the role newer
technologies play in surveillance more broadly (Andrejevic 2007; Gates
2011; I. Kerr et al. 2009), but with much focus on privacy issues. New
database technologies, newer forms of information storehouses, as well
as newer communication technologies, like cell phones and pdas (per-
sonal digital assistants), have had pernicious implications for individual
and group privacy. Privacy is, however, a limited lens for thinking about
surveillance, since it is a right not granted equally to all, a fact that needs
to be taken into account in such investigations. Of course, “new methods
of authentication, verification and surveillance have increasingly allowed
persons and things to be digitally or biometrically identified, tagged,
tracked, and monitored in real time and in formats that can be captured,
archived, and retrieved indefinitely” (Kerr et al. 2009, xxiv), so newer sur-
veillance technologies do have implications for “informational privacy”—
defined as “the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine
for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them
is communicated to others” (ibid., xxvii). In light of these developments,
we need to ask the larger questions: who is considered to have a right to
privacy? Whose privacy is not a concern and why? And importantly, how
might a focus on these questions shape the field of surveillance studies?
For instance, many communities—including prisoners, those receiving
certain forms of welfare from the state, people with disabilities living
in institutional care, as well as immigrants and refugees—have histori-
cally had, and continue to have, their bodily privacy invaded, but there is
almost no public discussion about the infringement of their rights to pri-
vacy. As Rachel Hall notes in her contribution to this collection, privacy
concerns have not kept vulnerable communities safer in the case of patri-
archal violence, which often happens in the “private” space of the home.
Hall shows us that part of the project of a feminist approach to surveil-
lance studies is to “shift critical surveillance studies away from matters of
privacy, security, and efficiency to a consideration of the ethical problem

4 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet

of combating new forms of discrimination that are practiced in relation
to categories of privilege, access, and risk” (147).
This volume makes the case that the ways in which supposedly “neu-
tral” technologies are used requires a feminist analysis to access issues
of disenfranchisement. For instance, although whole-­body imaging tech-
nologies are specifically marketed to emphasize that they do not profile
individuals based on the color of their skin, these technologies never-
theless, in directly targeting particular communities (including working-­
class people, people with disabilities, and Muslim women) in ways that
line up with the racist and Islamophobic imperatives of the U.S. state,
serve to intensify existing inequalities. For example, backscatter x-­rays
continue the direct attack on the civil rights of transgender folks, as they
can visualize objects including breast prostheses and dildos, and thus
“out” trans people to airport screeners, and in doing so, make trans-
gender travelers vulnerable to transphobic screeners. In some cases, par-
ticularly in small towns, these newer surveillance technologies result in
the outing of transgender folks who pass in their communities, putting at
risk their jobs as well as their relationships with their families and friends
(Magnet and Rodgers 2012). These technologies also explicitly violate the
religious prohibitions of many religious groups, including some Muslim
women, and they have a disproportionate impact on people with disabili-
ties, as they visualize urostomy and colostomy bags (ibid.).1
One of the components of our feminist praxis is a commitment to self-­
reflexivity and attentiveness to the ways that feminist thought can be co-­
opted, for instance, for projects that dovetail with state interests. A few
essays in this volume excavate the links that surveillance practices have
to the burgeoning prison industrial complex—an important feminist
concern since women of color remain the fastest growing demographic
of people to be included behind bars (Fraden 2001; M. Alexander 2010)—
highlighting how a wide range of practices, from news coverage of crimes
by people of color to turning to the police in domestic-­violence situa-
tions, often results in facilitating the incarceration of vulnerable bodies.
Andrea Smith (this volume) demonstrates the ways that relying on police
to place perpetrators of violence under surveillance only makes those who
are being subjected to aggression also vulnerable to harms caused by the
state. In fact, feminist interventions into the law that aimed to involve
police have backfired (incite! Women of Color Against Violence 2006).
For example, mandatory arrest policies, whereby police must file charges

Introduction 5
in cases of domestic violence, have regularly resulted in the women them-
selves being charged and ending up in prison (Pollack, Green, and Alls-
pach 2005). Moreover, Smith argues that because we imagine the surveil-
lance apparatus of the state to be a sufficient response to violence, we fail
to think of other, more creative solutions. Discussing one woman who
lived with a batterer in her apartment building, but feared calling the
police, Smith is struck by the fact that “the only potential interveners in
this situation seems to be ourselves as individuals or the state. It seems
like our only response is either a privatized response to violence or a com-
munal one that is state-­driven” (36). The result is not only that we do not
“see” other solutions to the problem of violence, but that we also become
absolved from having to see the violence in the first place. Smith argues
that we need to dismantle penal responses to violence and begin to imag-
ine responses outside this punitive system.
Ummni Khan, in her contribution to this collection, argues that a cer-
tain type of feminist response to sex work—one that argues for the crimi-
nalization of johns—results in the disproportionate criminalization of
vulnerable men. Asserting that there is a strand of feminist thought com-
mitted to abolishing prostitution that engages in what she calls “feminist
surveillance practices” of male sex-­trade clients, Khan shows that these
are surveillance practices that continually lead to the disproportionate
criminalization of poor men and men of color. Khan demonstrates the
collusion between antiprostitution feminist thought and state agencies,
which results in what Elizabeth Bernstein terms “carceral feminism”
(2010)—a feminist politics that is entwined with criminalization and
that fails to address the importance of penal abolition to any feminist
movement.2
In addition to new theoretical frameworks and ideological commit-
ments, we argue that a feminist approach to surveillance studies also
needs new methodological tools. In their contribution to this volume,
Kevin Walby and Seantel Anaïs propose that we introduce the pioneer-
ing methods of institutional ethnography, developed by feminist sociolo-
gist Dorothy Smith, to the practice of examining surveillance documents.
An institutional-­ethnographic methodological approach to surveillance,
Walby and Anaïs illustrate, shows how the categories produced by sur-
veillance documentation are, of course, gendered, racialized, sexualized,
and classed.

6 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet

Surveillance as Foundational Structure

A feminist approach to surveillance studies highlights the ways that sur-

veillance is integral to many of our foundational structural systems, ones
that breed disenfranchisement, and that continue to be institutionalized.
In an extension of bell hooks’s notion of “white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy” (hooks 1997), we suggest the (clumsy, but illustrative) term
“white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal surveillance”: the use of
surveillance practices and technologies to normalize and maintain white-
ness, able-­bodiedness, capitalism, and heterosexuality, practices integral
to the foundation of the modern state. Smith’s contribution to this collec-
tion reminds that while the modern bureaucratic state is often the focus
of surveillance studies, the surveillance of native peoples is a key foun-
dational strategy of colonialism: technologies of surveillance were inte-
gral to settler colonialism. Smith calls for the centering of an anticolonial
feminist analysis within the field of surveillance studies, as she recounts
how the violence of surveillance through organized settler colonial prac-
tices transformed First Peoples into racialized communities, thus facili-
tating the bureaucratically managed rape of indigenous people, making
them “rapeable.”
State surveillance practices, which we might simply call state practices
(since surveillance is so seamlessly embedded), are processes that are
simultaneously about seeing and not-­seeing—that is, some bodies are
made invisible, while others are made hypervisible (see Smith, Moore,
Jiwani, and Hall, this volume). The underlying structures of domination
that created the conditions for violence in communities of color—such as
the incarceration of indigenous peoples in residential schools or the in-
stitutionalized rape that accompanied slavery—are made invisible, while
the cycle of violence that residential schools or that slavery created in
terms of ongoing violence in communities of color are hypervisibilized,
surveilled, and then subject to violent state intervention. As Yasmin Ji-
wani notes in her essay in this volume, which looks at how the commercial
Canadian media covered the Shafia murders (four Afghan women mur-
dered by family members in Canada), when violence happens in commu-
nities of color, it is understood as ordinary and expected—people from
these communities are configured as always already criminals—whereas
violence in white communities is imagined to be exceptional. This racist
imagining of violence as key to communities of color justifies new forms
of surveillance by the state in ways that facilitate the disproportionate

Introduction 7
criminalization of communities of color. As Hall notes in her essay on
body scanners in airports, whiteness is transparent—a racialization that
does not require monitoring—whereas racialized bodies are opaque and
therefore suspect. Similarly, Moore’s contribution to this volume exam-
ines the increasing reliance on a genre of institutional photography—
photographs of battered women—by police in cases involving battery,
under a system of white supremacy. Moore shows that women of color
(particularly dark-­skinned women) are not revealed through the mecha-
nism of photography, especially their injuries, in the same way as white
women.
Laura Hyun Yi Kang’s piece in this volume, about the history of anti-
trafficking, highlights how subjecting female bodies to observation has
long been a practice in the United States. She examines the surveillance of
the “differentially stratified mobilities” of women across borders, noting
that the surveillance and scrutiny of women immigrating to the United
States bespeaks founding imperialist racialist narratives in the United
States. Focusing on trafficking in the League of Nations, Kang asserts
that women were simultaneously hailed as objects and subjects of sur-
veillance. The women were, on the one hand, seen as involved in the polic-
ing of other women, but on the other hand, at the borders of the nation
where they were imagined to be trafficked, they were placed under greater
surveillance which resulted in racialized sexist scrutiny.
As Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah (this volume) show in their
analysis of the birth certificate, gender and sexuality are inextricably
bound to surveillant practices of documentation. Beginning with the
binary system of gender imposed on babies born on U.S. soil, each of
whom must be categorized and documented as a boy or a girl, living in
the modern bureaucratic state is about the policing of gendered identi-
ties. Of course, as Moore and Currah demonstrate, the practice of docu-
menting citizens via birth certificates is not a simple recording of bodily
identities, but a process of surveillance that produces gendered identities
in ways that do both epistemological and ontological violence to bodies
that do not fit the male-­female binary. In fact, statistics (including track-
ing and gathering information about gender) is intimately tied to the
rise of statehood, as states gain the power to govern in part by collecting
knowledge about their citizenry (Bowker and Star 1999, 110). Thus, in the
words of the communication theorist Armand Mattelart, “measurement,
computing, and recording have been the recurrent traits of the long pro-
cess of construction of the modern mode of communication, starting

8 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet

with the first manifestations of ‘statistical reason’ ” (1996, xvi). A femi-
nist approach to surveillance studies demonstrates how the production of
knowledge, when it comes to vulnerable bodies, is always already bound
up with gendered and sexualized ways of seeing. The essays in part 1 make
clear that surveillance practices are actually part of the founding mecha-
nisms of many nation-­states, as well as of the practices used to keep track
of the citizens of these nation-­states.

The Visual and Surveillance: Bodies on Display

Part of what we add to ongoing conversations about surveillance is the

idea that surveillance practices do not only “dismantle or disaggregate
the coherent body bit by bit” (Ericson and Haggerty 2006), but also re-
make the body, producing new ways of visualizing bodily identities in
ways that highlight othered forms of racialized, gendered, classed, abled,
and disabled bodies, as well as sexualized identities. Surveillance studies
can help to show that many surveillance practices and technologies were
initially refined by focusing on the state’s most vulnerable communities,
bringing into sharp focus how oppression is made functional in a given
context. For example, biometric technologies (which are used to identify
features specific to an individual’s body) were initially tested on prisoners
who could not resist their use and were only recently used in a wider
range of applications, such as fingerprint scanners on phones for con-
sumer security. In her groundbreaking book Terrorist Assemblages (2007),
queer theorist Jasbir Puar examines the move within the field of surveil-
lance studies to focus on the “data body” or informational profile. Ex-
amining new security practices, including the x-­raying of Sikh turbans
at airports, Puar reminds that the body is never a cage of pure informa-
tion, but rather always a racialized, gendered, and sexualized being. Puar
asserts that while “surveillance assemblages” tend “toward discounting
and dismissing the visual and its capacity to interpellate subjects . . . this
discounting is simply not politically viable given the shifts around forma-
tions of race and sex that are under way in response to a new visual cate-
gory, the ‘terrorist look-­alike’ or those who ‘look like terrorists’ ” (2007,
229). A concern in this collection is the interaction between the infor-
mational profile (a statistical profile that contains information including
age, social security number, and so forth), the surveillance of gender, race,
class, and sexuality, and the implications of the visual when it comes to
surveillance practices and technologies.

Introduction 9
 One entry point for discussing visualized displays of the body via sur-
veillance is the rich tradition of feminist scholarship in media studies.
This scholarship enables us to focus on the contingencies of the visual
and how newer surveillance technologies both produce and are produced
by new forms of pleasure in looking. While a camera filming an actor
in a scene for a film is not conventionally understood to be an act of
surveillance proper, the visual display of bodies inherent to films and
other forms of visual media, and to many practices involving surveil-
lance technologies, suggest the need to mine the valuable insights of the
rich tradition of critical feminist media studies scholarship for what it
has to offer the study of surveillance. Aligning surveillance studies with
feminist media studies reminds of the necessity of grounding visualiz-
ing practices in a history of systemic discrimination, one helpfully theo-
rized by feminist media scholars. Our aim is to bring this work into the
conversation about surveillance and point out that issues key to surveil-
lance studies have been of concern to critical feminist scholars for quite
some time.
In a culture that consistently puts women’s bodies on visual display,
and where this display can have implications particular to their gender-
ing, any analysis of a technology that has the possibility of achieving
these ends needs to contend with the complicated intersection of gender
and the politics of the visual. From hooks’s (1992) analysis of the hyper-
visibility of black female bodies, to Laura Mulvey’s (1975) foundational
work on the “male gaze,” which examines how the film camera is used to
invite the gaze of the audience to scrutinize female bodies, to the ways
that bodies are made spectacular in racialized and gendered ways in sci-
ence and medicine (Treichler, Cartwright, and Penley 1998), feminist
scholarship dealing with issues related to surveillance has been around
for decades. At the root of Mulvey’s work are questions about the poli-
tics of looking—about the surveillance of othered bodies—for both the
looker and the object being looked at, and the implications of the plea-
sures derived from this process. Integral to Mulvey’s analysis are the gen-
dered implications when the object looked at is a woman, a concern that
needs to be carried over to any examination of how the surveillant gaze
can make visible gendered bodies. Of course, as hooks (1992) insists, and
as the work of Kang (2002) makes clear, racialized female bodies on dis-
play in visual media require particular consideration from critical schol-
ars, something to which this volume is attentive.
As Moore, Jiwani, Hall, and Dubrofsky and Wood’s essays in this vol-

10 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet

ume make clear, central to much critical feminist media scholarship are
questions about the contingencies of the visual display of disenfranchised
bodies, a display that also often results from the use of technologies that
behave in many ways like surveillance technologies. As Jiwani demon-
strates in her contribution, surveillance technologies work to discipline
certain bodies in particular ways, making some bodies hypervisible and
others invisible, crafting regimes of intelligibility wherein what is ren-
dered invisible is legitimized and taken for granted as an inherent part of
the social fabric. Jiwani argues that visibility serves to heighten the focus
on particular bodies by foregrounding their difference, and in the case of
the coverage of the Shafia murders in the popular Canadian press, this
logic of the visual situates Muslim bodies as beyond the purview of what
it means to be and to look like a law-­abiding Canadian.
While some of the surveillance technologies used to put bodies on
visual display may be new, many of the ideas and forms of oppression
associated with and reproduced by them are not and can be seen in longer
standing forms of media. As Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood
show in their chapter, which examines tabloid coverage of celebrity use
of Twitter, Twitter enables the articulation of women as placing themselves
under surveillance by “voluntarily” posting photographs. Using critical
feminist media scholarship, they show how women are framed as em-
powered and agentic, situating them as complicit in invitations to the
male gaze. While new forms of social media are imagined to produce new
possibilities for feminist agency online, Dubrofsky and Wood show how
age-­old sexist and racist tropes persist when self-­fashioning in a con-
sumer context is configured as a form of empowerment and active invi-
tation of the male gaze is imagined as a form of agency. Dubrofsky and
Wood highlight the racialized implications of such tropes: white women
are presented as agentic through the hard work (exercise and diet) they
put into making their bodies ready for the male gaze; women of color are
always already gaze-­worthy in ways that rely on racist sexisms.
We are reminded of how narratives that emphasize the possibilities
of the formidable potential of x-­ray vision (such as Spiderman and Bat-
man) may serve to shape technological development, as scientists inter-
nalize these cultural messages about consumer desires and attempt to
actualize them in new technologies, an issue discussed by Hall in this vol-
ume, in her essay on whole-­body imaging machines that visualize people’s
bodies naked under their clothes. Surveillance technologies that visual-
ize the body reference long-­standing cultural and science fictional pre-

Introduction 11
occupations with x-­ray eyes, in which x-­ray vision is imagined in media
from comic books to news representations to be a form of seeing that is
all-­powerful and all-­revealing, and thus an exciting and powerful tech-
nological development. In a culture that sexualizes the visual display of
female bodies, this type of technology can have specific implications for
female bodies. For instance, attendants of the Transportation Security
Administration (tsa) in the United States encourage screeners to pay
particular attention when hegemonically attractive women pass through
these scanners (Hall, this volume), intensifying existing forms of sexual
harassment. In this way, the technologies facilitate x-­ray eyes that re-
quire security personnel to stare at certain bodies while obscuring the
pleasure taken in rendering these bodies visible, as well as mystifying the
process by which some bodies are made hypervisible and others invisible.
This is a process Magnet has elsewhere termed “surveillant scopophilia”
(2011)—that is, when new technologies provide opportunities for plea-
sure in looking in ways connected to surveillance. How the technologies
capture the body can have significant implications, as Moore (this vol-
ume) articulates in her discussion of how police photographs of battered
women create images in which the battered bodies of women of color do
not translate in ways that reproduce the commonsense aesthetics of what
a battered woman looks like.
A possible distinction between the use of surveillance technologies
and images created by the entertainment industry for mass consumption
is that the images and data created by the former are not necessarily or
expressly used to construct consumable products for a mass audience, as
is the case for the latter. However, in the most popular television genre of
the last decade, reality tv, techniques that mimic surveillance practices
are used to gather footage that resembles surveillance footage of real
people doing real things—that is, not actors performing scripted lines—
to create an entertainment product for mass consumption. The reality tv
genre puts into relief a poignant concern for our project, one originally
raised by feminists looking at the genre of pornography (L. Williams 1989;
McClintock 1993), but which permeates media practices nowadays: how
does the visual display of “real” bodies doing “real” things add a twist to a
critical analysis of representation? What are the implications of saying,
“But she really behaved that way. We caught it on film,” rather than “She
was scripted in this way. The director instructed her to play her role in this
manner”? The little existent feminist scholarship on this genre (Hasinoff
2008; Dubrofsky 2011a) is helpful in addressing these concerns, but there

12 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet

is simply not enough, though there is a remarkable burgeoning and thriv-
ing field of critical scholarship on racialized bodies in the reality tv genre,
all of which can be fruitfully brought into conversation with the work of
surveillance scholars.3
Newer media suture the subject more personally, more directly, as a
producer (not just a consumer) of culture, creating what some now refer
to as a “prosumer” (blurring of the lines between the consumer and pro-
ducer). While newer media can enable the reproduction of historical op-
pressive power relations existent in “older” media, they also add impor-
tant new dimensions requiring investigation and understanding. For
instance, what happens when we can no longer say about an image (as we
might with a representation on a reality tv show) that it was edited and
shown out of context? Witness the case of Natalie Blanchard in Quebec,
who lost her disability insurance benefits (for depression) because she
appeared “too happy” in Facebook photographs that she posted during
her sick leave (Sawchuk 2010). Much was made, in particular, of a photo-
graph of Blanchard in a bikini, with online discussions of how good she
looked in the bikini and of this somehow attesting to her (sound) men-
tal health. How do questions of empowerment and responsibility become
articulated when individuals operate the technologies that functionally
surveil them and are used to obstruct their right to the privileges of citi-
zenship, including assistance from the state, as well as to get them fired,
to socially ostracize them, and so forth? What are the particular implica-
tions of this for female, racialized, queer, and disabled subjects?

Biometric Technologies as Surveillance Assemblages

Biometric technologies are accompanied by a whole host of surveillance

practices that specifically focus on the body as we are increasingly locked
into what the sociologist Simone Browne calls the “identity-­industrial
complex,” where the body itself is the central target of surveillance prac-
tices (2009). As Hall’s work in this volume demonstrates, the failure of
new technologies to keep people safe intersects with their race, class,
gender, sexuality, and disabled- or able-­bodied identities. One example
of this is the ways that the surveillance of disability is facilitated by new
reproductive technologies. For instance, the Newborn Screening Saves
Lives Act mandates the collection of dna information from every baby
born on U.S. soil. The genetic information collected from newborn babies
is subject to an increasing number of genetic tests—a number that has

Introduction 13
dramatically expanded alongside new technological advances (Magnet
2012). Of course, this means the state increasingly screens for disabili-
ties in ways that recall eugenics projects, as new technologies are used as
a form of mandated surveillance by the state to facilitate the surveillance
of disability. As Dorothy E. Roberts shows in her contribution to this vol-
ume, the increase in the number of amniocenteses performed is also part
of the surveillance of disability, as “it is increasingly routine for pregnant
women to get prenatal diagnoses for certain genetic conditions, such as
Down syndrome or dwarfism” (176), even in cases where women do not
understand what the test is for or its attendant risks.
Of course, new reproductive technologies have different implications
for white women and for women of color, and for women in the Global
South versus women in the Global North. Roberts reminds us that in 1985
the feminist theorist Gena Corea “predicted that white women would hire
surrogates of color in reproductive brothels to be implanted with their
eggs and to gestate their babies at low cost” (169), this prediction high-
lights the differential ways genetic technologies are likely to be accessed.
Corea’s prediction has come true, as Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita
Das Dasgupta show in their contribution to this volume, which looks at
the growing surrogacy industry in India. DasGupta and Dasgupta demon-
strate that, for the most part, wealthy women from the Global North, as
well as some wealthy Indian citizens, pay to have impoverished or finan-
cially struggling Indian women implanted with an embryo via in-­vitro
fertilization. In this piece, we see how the bodies of women of color are
literally put into the service of reproducing empire for another country
(often North America, Australia, or Europe) by producing offspring for
what is often a white couple, and placed under surveillance to make sure
they are doing so properly. Like Smith, DasGupta and Dasgupta demon-
strate the urgent need for an analysis of colonialism and colonial prac-
tices in surveillance studies. They argue that surveillance practices facili-
tated by the economic necessity of Indian surrogates pave the way for all
kinds of gender, class, and imperialist violences.
In examining state attempts—with an orientalist and imperial gaze—
to render “terrorist bodies” both pathological and animalistic—Hall illus-
trates that biotechnologies are deployed to turn these bodies inside out
and make them transparent in ways that intensify systemic forms of vio-
lence already inflicted on marginalized communities. In her discussion
of full-­body scanners in U.S. airports, Hall looks at the centering of the
notion that white, middle-­class, able-­bodied, heterosexual passengers

14 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet

should not have their bodily privacy invaded by tsa officials. Race issues
are indeed often at the forefront in the marketing of the technologies—
for instance, companies aiming to get state institutions to invest in iden-
tification technologies claim biometrics will circumvent persistent forms
of racial profiling. Biometric technologies render the body in binary code,
and industry manufacturers of these technologies claim this code re-
veals nothing about race, gender, class, or sexuality, instead representing
bodies as anesthetized strands of ones and zeroes. However, it is increas-
ingly clear that biometric technologies are in fact a high-­tech form of
racial and gender profiling that efficiently and quickly sorts people using
criteria that often explicitly include race and gender. For example, in
order to verify the identity of a particular individual, it would be faster to
scan the individual against a smaller group of people with like character-
istics, rather than against an entire database. For many biometric tech-
nologies, “like characteristics” include race and gender identities. Reify-
ing race and gender in this way through their biometric categorization
only serves to intensify existing forms of biological racialism and sexism,
in which race and gender are imagined as stable biological properties that
can be reliably read off the body.

New Perspectives

What does this book tell us that is new? Part of the “new” is the explicit
placing of the field of surveillance studies in historical perspective, by
taking a transdisciplinary focus and forefronting a feminist praxis. An-
other “new” is the overt framing of the concern with widespread sur-
veillance as not a new phenomenon, by excavating and highlighting
long-­standing concerns with surveillance that pre-­date the explosion of
scholarship on the topic and precede 9/11 (a signal moment for much
surveillance scholarship). This collection demonstrates the importance
of thinking beyond contemporary developments in new technologies and
the intensification of surveillance since the 1980s, tracing the history of
surveillance back to organized forms of state control such as slavery,
the management of women’s reproductive autonomy, the regulation of
sexuality, and the institutionalized scrutiny of those living in poverty.
Rather than rehashing arguments as to whether or not surveillance keeps
the United States safe, we instead take an intersectional critical femi-
nist approach to illuminate what constitutes surveillance, who is scruti-
nized, why, and at what cost. As we show throughout this introduction

Introduction 15
and edited collection, surveillance continually impacts people of color,
women, queer and trans people, and people with disabilities. From the
ways that surveillance has facilitated the state-­sponsored rape of indige-
nous peoples (Smith, this volume) to the ways that surveillance remains
central to the policing of the reproduction of women of color (DasGupta
and Dasgupta, this volume; Roberts, this volume), in asking what the
conditions of possibility for the emergence and intensification of surveil-
lance practices might be, we hope to show the connection of these prac-
tices to systemic forms of discrimination.
This collection demonstrates the theoretical significance of surveil-
lance for other fields, from feminist media studies scholarship that looks
at how women are put on display in visual forms of media, to critical
criminological examinations of how photographic evidence is used in
cases involving the battery of women in intimate relationships, to re-
search in sexuality studies that examines the surveillance of transgender
folks through new forms of identification and documentation practices.
We hope this volume will encourage more cross-­disciplinary conversa-
tions and alliances. How might we think about how to build coalitions
across difference? A feminist approach to surveillance studies also argues
for a reimagining of collective responses to the violence of state scrutiny,
one that seeks to uproot and defy oppressive structural systems, envi-
sioning collective forms of resistance to violence that do not involve state
surveillance of those living either inside or outside its borders, and asks
how we might make our communities safer while continuing to refuse
surveillance practices. Additionally, we would like to facilitate the genera-
tion of new research interests on the topic of surveillance; for instance,
to open up avenues for the examination of mediascapes that increasingly
blur the lines between what have conventionally been understood as pub-
lic and private spheres, and the concomitant implications of the use by
private citizens of personal technologies to create publicly available and
widely circulating images and bits of data. Above all, we contend that
the critical implications of surveillance cannot be explored without at-
tentiveness to issues of oppression. We would like this volume to encour-
age discussions about the implications of surveillance for disenfranchised
bodies, conversations that engage long-­standing concerns raised by criti-
cal scholars looking at the display of gendered, classed, sexualized, racial-
ized, disabled, or able bodies.

16 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet

Notes

1. There was discussion of removing backscatter x-­rays from airports (they

were moved to airports in smaller cities in 2012, however), but the Transportation
Security Administration awarded the company American Science and Engineering
(as&e) a $245 million contract to purchase its SmartCheck backscatter x-­ray detec-
tion device for an indefinite period. These scanners remain in use. See “American
Science and Engineering, Inc. Awarded $245 million idiq Contract for SmartCheck
Next Generation Advanced Imaging Technology,” press release, 9 October 2012,
as&e website, http://ir.as-­e.com/releasedetail.cfm?Releaseid=712149.
2. Penal abolitionists are part of a mass-­based movement committed to ending,
rather than rehabilitating, the prison system, arguing that the prison-industrial
complex is a fundamentally flawed system that entrenches existing inequalities
(Davis and Rodriguez 2000). This movement aims to find alternatives to the prison
system as a warehouse for women, poor people, people of color, queer people, and
people with disabilities (Davis 2003; Smith 2008).
3. On racialized bodies in reality tv, see Dubrofsky 2011b; Kraszewski 2004;
Orbe 2008.

Introduction 17
 PART I

SURVEILLANCE AS
FOUNDATIONAL STRUCTURE
 1
NOT-­S EEING
State Surveillance, Settler Colonialism, and Gender Violence

ANDREA SMITH

He [Father Olbés] sent for the husband and he asked him why his wife hadn’t borne
children. The Indian pointed to the sky . . . to signify that only God knew the cause
. . . asked through the interpreter if he slept with his wife, to which the Indian said
yes. Then the father had them placed in a room together so that they would per-
form coitus in his presence. The Indian refused, but they forced him to show him
his penis in order to affirm that he had it in good order. The father next brought the
wife and had . . . her enter another room in order to examine her reproductive parts.

—David E. Stannard, American Holocaust

The focus of surveillance studies has generally been on the modern, bu-
reaucratic state. And yet, as David Stannard’s (1992) account of the sexual
surveillance of indigenous peoples within the Spanish mission system
in the Americas demonstrates, the history of patriarchal and colonial-
ist surveillance in this continent is much longer. The traditional account
of surveillance studies tends to occlude the manner in which the settler
state is foundationally built on surveillance. Because surveillance studies
focuses on the modern, bureaucratic state, it has failed to account for
the gendered colonial history of surveillance. Consequently, the strate-
gies for addressing surveillance do not question the state itself, but rather
seek to modify the extent to which and the manner in which the state
surveils. As Mark Rifkin (2011) and Scott Morgensen (2011) additionally
demonstrate, the sexual surveillance of native peoples was a key strategy
by which native peoples were rendered manageable populations within
the colonial state. One would think that an anticolonial feminist analysis
would be central to the field of surveillance studies. Yet, ironically, it is
this focus on the modern state that often obfuscates the settler colonial-
ist underpinning of technologies of surveillance. I explore how a feminist
surveillance-­studies focus on gendered colonial violence reshapes the
field by bringing into view that which cannot be seen: the surveillance
strategies that have effected indigenous disappearance in order to estab-
lish the settler state itself. In particular, a focus on gendered settler colo-
nialism foregrounds how surveillance is not simply about “seeing” but
about “not-­seeing” the settler state.

Surveillance and the Biopolitical Modern State

David Lyon (2007) defines surveillance as follows.

For the sake of argument, we may start by saying that it is the focused,
systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of
influence, management, protection or direction. Surveillance directs
its attention in the end to individuals (even though aggregate data,
such as those available in the public domain, may be used to build up a
background picture). It is focused. By systematic, I mean that this at-
tention to personal details is not random, occasional or spontaneous;
it is deliberate and depends on certain protocols and techniques. Be-
yond this, surveillance is routine; it occurs as a “normal” part of every-
day life in all societies. (14)
The field of surveillance studies is important, Lyon argues, because of
the “rapidly increasing influence of surveillance in our daily lives and
in the operation of very large-­scale operations” (ibid., 9). The growth in
surveillance is often tied to Foucauldian notions of the rise of the disci-
plinary society and the ascendancy of biopolitics in which peoples be-
come populations to be counted, measured, and regulated in order to pro-
mote the life of the normalizing state. Because certain populations are
deemed threats to the normalizing state, they must be constantly moni-
tored, and thus are subject to what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) defines
as “premature death” in order to preserve the body of the whole. And yet
Foucault notes that, ironically, these biopolitical moves were first prac-

22 Andrea Smith
ticed on the bourgeoisie themselves. Through the disciplining of the bour-
geois body, the “normal” body is defined as the measure by which all other
bodies are marked as “deviant” (Foucault 1980, 123). Logics of normaliza-
tion must have some pretense to universality even as these normalizing
strategies are not evenly applied. Thus, it is no surprise that these disci-
plinary techniques come to be used broadly, not just on those populations
deemed to be threats.

The Temporality of Settler Colonial Biopolitics

As noted by many critical-­race- and ethnic-­studies scholars, the manner

in which Foucauldian analyses of the state tend to temporally situate bio-
power during the era of the modern state disappears the biopolitics of
settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery.1 Alexander Weheliye (2014)
points out that Foucault’s conception of a complicated biopower is juxta-
posed against a simpler “ordinary racism” (Foucault 1997, 128). As Fou-
cault asserts, “I am certainly not saying that racism was invented at this
time. It had already been in existence for a very long time. But I think it
functioned elsewhere” (ibid., 254). Relegated to both a theoretical and
geotemporal “elsewhere,” Foucault then provides no elaboration on the
nature of this “other” racism.” As Weheliye (2014) argues, when biopower
is rendered as the real racism, whose apex can be found in Nazi Germany,
indigenous genocide, slavery, and colonialism disappear into given forms
of simple racism that require no account of their logics. Similarly, Achille
Mbembe argues that the mechanics of Nazi Germany are not fundamen-
tally different from the “necropolitics” of the colony or the plantation in
which “‘peace’ is more likely to take on the face of a ‘war without end’”
(2003, 23). Denise Ferreira da Silva’s germinal text, Toward a Global Idea
of Race (2007), also demonstrates that these forms of racism precede the
modern state as Western epistemology is itself fundamentally a racial
project. A focus on biopolitical racism as it is tied to the modern state
thus often occludes analysis of the racial logics of settler colonialism and
plantation slavery.
Surveillance studies’s focus on the modern state similarly hides an
analysis of the settler colonialist and white supremacist logics of surveil-
lance that precede the ascendancy of the modern state. Furthermore,
attention to these colonial and white supremacist logics of surveillance
require a feminist analysis, since colonialism and white supremacy are
structured by heteropatriarchy. For instance, Mark Rifkin’s When Did Indi-

Not-Seeing 23
ans Become Straight? and Scott Morgensen’s Spaces Between Us call atten-
tion to the heteropatriarchal nature of colonial bio/necropolitics. That is,
the shift from categorizing native peoples within the U.S. polity accord-
ing to their membership in distinct nations to lumping them together
under the racial category of “Indian” is often understood as a colonial
tactic. But what Rifkin and Morgensen demonstrate is that this categori-
zation is dependent on heteronormativity. Since they pose a threat to the
colonial order, native nations are broken up into heteronormative indi-
vidual family units in order to facilitate their absorption into the colonial
state. This absorption occurs through a colonialist surveillance strategy
by which the sexual and gender identities of native peoples must be con-
stantly marked and policed. Through this surveillance, native peoples be-
come racialized “Indians” who are managed through the politics of bio-
power (Rifkin 2011). Of course, as racialized subjects, native nations still
constitute a threat to the well-­being of the colonial state and hence are
never properly heteronormative. The United States continues to be ob-
sessed with solving the “Indian problem,” whether through boarding
schools or land allotments. But Indianization, as it were, allows colo-
nialism to become a population problem rather than a political problem
(ibid.). Native nations are seen as sufficiently domesticated to be adminis-
tered through government policy, rather than seen as a continuing politi-
cal threat requiring ongoing military intervention.
In addition, as Driskill, Finley, Gilley, and Morgensen (2011) argue, na-
tive peoples are fundamentally “queered” under settler colonialism such
that conquest is justified by their sexual perversity. Deemed “sodomites,”
native peoples’ presumed sexual perversity justifies their genocide. In-
digenous colonization is then achieved through sexual regulation, such
as sexual acts of terror (the mass rapes of native peoples in massacres), as
well as policies of normalization in which heteropatriarchy is instilled in
native communities through allotment, boarding schools, and criminal-
ization, among other contemporary forms of the surveillance and regu-
lation of native peoples. As I have argued elsewhere, sexual violence was
a primary colonial strategy by which native peoples were rendered inher-
ently rapeable, and by extension their lands inherently invadeable, and
their resources inherently extractable (A. Smith 2005a). Thus, contrary
to Lyon’s assertion that “the focused, systematic and routine attention
to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection
or direction” preceded the rise of the bureaucratic state, these strategies

24 Andrea Smith
were foundational to the settler state that required the gendered reclas-
sification of the people from various indigenous nations into “Indians.”
As Patrick Wolfe (1999) notes, settler colonialism is a structure, not an
event; that is, settler colonialism requires the continual disappearance
of the indigenous peoples on whose land the settler state is situated (2).
Consequently, these colonial heteropatriarchal logics continue. As Jacqui
Alexander’s critique of the heteropatriarchal postcolonial state demon-
strates, on one hand, the postcolonial state (or states that strive to be
postcolonial) is imagined to be incapable of self-­governance through its
previously described presumed sexual perversity. It thus seeks to prove
its ability to self-­govern by continuing the colonial policing of supposed
sexually perverse “nonprocreative noncitizens” within its borders to
legitimate its claims to govern. In policing the gender and sexual bound-
aries of the nation-­state by purifying it of imagined racialized and gen-
dered contaminants, Alexander (2005) argues, the postcolonial state suc-
ceeds in obfuscating the permeability of its boundaries to multinational
capital. This policing, structured under the logics of what Maria Josefina
Saldaña-­Portillo (2003) terms “aggrieved masculinity,” then serves to
allay the anxiety of the postcolonial state and postcolonial aspirants in
the wake of the postcolonial state’s feminization within the heteropatri-
archal logics of global capital. While Lyon’s analysis points us to the sur-
veillance strategies of the state, an anticolonial feminist analysis demon-
strates that the problem is instead the state itself as surveillance strategy.
Consequently, it is no surprise that states that have “decolonized” per-
petuate the same surveillance strategies, because surveillance is struc-
tured into the logic of the state itself. That is, if we relocate the focus of
surveillance studies from the bureaucratic state to the settler colonial,
white supremacist, and heteropatriarchal state, we may then reformulate
our analysis of surveillance.
In particular, I would like to foreground the focus of the field of sur-
veillance studies on “seeing.” According to Lyon, “Surveillance studies is
about seeing things and, more particularly, about seeing people” (2007, 1).
The “watchful gaze,” as Lyon labels it, is what gives surveillance its “quint-
essential characteristic” (2007, 1). A focus on gendered settler colonial-
ism would instead foreground how surveillance is about a simultaneous
seeing and not-­seeing. That is, the purposeful gaze of the state on some
things and peoples serves the purpose of simultaneously making some
hypervisible through surveillance while making others invisible. The colo-

Not-Seeing 25
nial gaze that surveils native communities to monitor, measure, and ac-
count for their “dysfunctional” behaviors conceals from view the settler
colonial state that creates these conditions in the first place. A feminist
surveillance studies focus on gendered colonial violence highlights that
which cannot be seen—indigenous disappearance.

The Settler Surveillance Strategies of Not-­Seeing

Settler colonialism fundamentally relies on a logic of not-­seeing. In par-

ticular, on a not-­seeing of the indigenous people’s lands in order to allow
their colonial takeover. Terra nullius, the legal justification used for the
expropriation of indigenous land in Australia and elsewhere—or to use
the Zionist justification for Palestinian expulsion, “a land without a
people for a people without a land”—is premised on the not-­seeing of
peoples already there. Within the United States, this expropriation relied
on the “doctrine of discovery.” As outlined in the case Johnson v. McIntosh
(1823), “Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and
this overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives.” “Discovery” neces-
sarily rests on the absence of native peoples, who would otherwise be
the actual “discoverers” of their lands. And, as Robert Williams (2005)
notes, U.S. jurisprudence has never renounced the doctrine of discovery
on which Indian case law is based. Consequently, the colonial project is a
somewhat precarious project of disappearing the peoples that it cannot
see—a genocide that must disavow itself. As Sarita See argues, “If the
history of the American empire is defined by forgetting, its aesthetic is
structured by double disavowal. According to the New World aesthetic,
it seems possible to erase the erasure of the past” (2009, 66). Thus, the
strategies of surveillance are always simultaneously not just about what
can be seen, but about disappearing from view that which delegitimizes
the state itself. What must not be seen is not only the peoples themselves,
but the forms of governance and ways of life that they represent.
Gender violence is a central strategy of settler colonialism and white
supremacy. Colonizers did not just kill off indigenous peoples in this land:
native massacres were always accompanied by sexual mutilation and rape.
The goal of colonialism is not just to kill colonized peoples, but to destroy
their sense of being people (A. Smith 2005a). The generally nonpatriar-
chal and nonhierarchical nature of many native communities posed a
threat to European patriarchal societies. Consequently, when colonists
first came to this land, they saw the necessity of instilling patriarchy in

26 Andrea Smith
native communities, for they realized that indigenous peoples would not
accept colonial domination if their own indigenous societies were not
structured on the basis of social hierarchies. Patriarchy rests on a gender-­
binary system; hence, it is no coincidence that colonizers also targeted
indigenous peoples who did not fit within this binary model. Gender vio-
lence thus inscribed patriarchy onto the bodies of native peoples, natu-
ralizing social hierarchies and colonial domination.
The imposition of heteropatriarchy serves not only to secure colonial
domination for indigenous peoples, but also to secure patriarchy within
the colonizing society against the threats of the alternative governance
structures that indigenous societies represent. It is noteworthy that the
high status of women and the relatively peaceful nature of many native
societies did not escape the notice of white peoples, in particular of white
women (A. Smith 2005b).2 A society based on domination, hierarchy, and
violence works only when it seems natural or inevitable. Given an alter-
native, peoples will generally choose not to live under violent conditions.
The demonization of native societies, as well as their resulting destruc-
tion, was necessary to securing the “inevitability” of patriarchy within
colonial societies. Again, the colonialist surveillance of native bodies
served the simultaneous purposes of making them visible to the state
while at the same time making invisible the threat to the settler state
posed by indigenous governance.
To further remove the threats that indigenous governance systems
posed to settler societies, the problem resulting from this colonial dis-­
ease was relocated from a patriarchal and violent settler state to the
“Indian” problem. As Wolfe (1999) notes, the more gender-­egalitarian na-
ture of some indigenous societies became anthropologically marked as
the sign of their unevolved, premodern status. By adopting patriarchy,
colonialists speculated, native peoples might evolve toward “humanity”
and “civilization.” Native peoples were to be bureaucratically managed
through allotment processes, church- and government-­run boarding
schools, and government-­run health programs, among other strategies
to facilitate their ascension to humanity. While courts often held that
native peoples were potential citizens with the right to vote—unlike Afri-
can Americans in the antebellum period—such potential could be real-
ized, from the colonialist perspective, only when those peoples mature
out of their status as native. In addition, native peoples’ were gener-
ally assigned the legal status of children, deemed legally incompetent to
handle their own affairs and thus legally marked as “nonworkers.” Native

Not-Seeing 27
peoples’ pathway to citizenship thus depended on their maturation into
adult (i.e., white) workers. Thus, native peoples’ acquisition of citizenship
and voting rights was framed as a reward for proving their ability to work.
In 1887 the Dawes Allotment Act divided native lands into individual
allotments of 80–160 acres. The federal government then expropriated
the remaining surplus lands. Native peoples were given fees in trust for
twenty-­five years, until deemed “competent” by the secretary of the in-
terior. They could then obtain fee patents enabling them to sell their
lands. The rationale for this policy was that the practice of communal
land ownership among native peoples was discouraging them from work-
ing the land. In the 1887 Indian commissioner’s report, J. D. C. Atkins ex-
plains the need for allotment:
Take the most prosperous and energetic community in the most
enterprising section of our country—New England; give them their
lands in common, furnish them annuities of food and clothing, send
them teachers to teach their children, preachers to preach the gospel,
farmers to till their lands, and physicians to heal their sick, and I pre-
dict that in a few years, a generation or two at most, their manhood
would be smothered. . . .
This pauperizing policy above outlined was, however, to some ex-
tent necessary at the beginning of our efforts to civilize the savage
Indian. He was taken a hostile barbarian, his tomahawk red with the
blood of the pioneer; he was too wild to know any of the arts of civili-
zation. . . . Hence some such policy had to resort to settle the nomadic
Indian and place him under control. This policy was a tentative one.
. . . Now, as fast as any tribe becomes sufficiently civilized and can be
turned loose and put upon its own footing, it should be done. Agricul-
ture and education will gradually do this work and finally enable the
Government to leave the Indian to stand alone. (Report of the Secretary
of the Interior 1887, n.p.)
The report warns that allotment will not work overnight: “Idleness, im-
providence, ignorance, and superstition cannot by law be transformed
into industry, thrift, intelligence, and Christianity speedily” (ibid., 4).
Consequently, surveillance practices were essential, in order to instill nor-
malizing discipline as a means to forcibly absorb native peoples into the
colonial state. This pathway toward civilization required native peoples to
adapt to a capitalist work model. The commissioner’s report further ex-
plained how work could save native peoples from barbarism.

28 Andrea Smith
 It must be apparent . . . that the system of gathering the Indians in
bands or tribes on reservations[,] . . . thus relieving them of the neces-
sity of labor, never will and never can civilize them. Labor is an essen-
tial element in producing civilization. . . . The greatest kindness the
government can bestow upon the Indian is to teach him to labor for
his own support, thus developing his true manhood, and, as a conse-
quence, making him self-­relying and self-­supporting. (ibid., 6–7)
Thus, through the careful policing and monitoring of native social struc-
tures, it would be possible to save native peoples from themselves, as well
as to absorb them into colonial whiteness.
Despite these civilizational strategies, native peoples never seemed to
attain humanity. Homi Bhabha (1997) and Edward Said (1994) argue that
the colonization process involves partially assimilating the colonized in
order to establish colonial rule. If the colonized group were to remain
completely different from the colonists, it would implicitly challenge the
supremacy of colonial rule, by introducing questions around whether the
way colonizers live is the only way to live. Hence, in order to preserve
the cultural ideals of the colonizers, the colonized had to resemble the
colonists—but only partially, for if the colonized were to be completely
assimilated, they would be equal to the colonists, and there would be no
reason to continue to colonize them. In this way, the promised assimi-
lation was never total or complete, which created a permanent colonial
anxiety with respect to the indigenous peoples who were to be absorbed.
As Kevin Bruyneel contends, advocacy for bestowing full citizenship on
native peoples soon gave way to notions of a more qualified citizenship, as
native peoples were deemed to be civilizing too slowly. Because of native
peoples’ imposed ontological status as children, they were never consid-
ered mature enough to earn full independence from their colonial fathers
(Bruyneel 2004, 3).

Surveillance and Gender Violence

The surveillance strategies employed to normalize native peoples—from

the monitoring of sexual behavior in Indian boarding schools to the sur-
veillance of land ownership through the Dawes Allotment Act—have
never come to an end, even though colonial policymakers continually
promise they will. The civilizing policies directed against native peoples
have never seemed to succeed enough to justify dismantling them. Of

Not-Seeing 29
course, one indicator used to determine that native peoples are continu-
ing to be a “problem” and are not sufficiently “civilized” is the high rate
of gender violence within native communities. As Dian Million (2014)
brilliantly notes, the U.S. government’s funding of healing programs goes
hand-­in-­hand with the imposition of neoliberal economic regimes on
Indian communities. According to this logic, native communities do not
deserve the right of self-­determination because they are violent. Instead,
under the guise of colonial paternalism, the state deems it necessary to
carefully monitor and surveil the violence within native communities in
order to once again save native peoples from themselves. Of course, in
this constant “seeing” of violence within native communities, the state
hides from view the fact that most such violence is a direct result of state
policy. What must not get seen is the inherent violence of the state itself.
In one example of this dynamic, the Australian government declared
a national emergency in the Northern Territory as a result of the publi-
cation of the Little Children Are Sacred report, which detailed the “prob-
lem” of child abuse in aboriginal communities in a manner similar to the
way gender violence in native communities is framed in the United States
(Povinelli 2011, 59). The government seized control of indigenous lands
through military police action, instituted compulsory medical exams for
children, and took control of the finances for all indigenous programs.
Through this intense surveillance, native peoples could be monitored in
terms of school attendance, purchasing choices, and medical practices.
While the report itself made an effort not to blame child abuse on ab-
original “culture,” it was used by the Australian government to identify
aboriginal culture as the problem and thus to justify its surveillance prac-
tices. Through these surveillance strategies, the Australian government
could “see” and hence surveil the problem of indigenous child abuse, yet it
did not see that these abuses were themselves the result of gendered colo-
nial policies, such as the government kidnapping of aboriginal children
from their communities in order to place them in violent government
schools (Manne 2004)—one example in which state abuse created child
abuse as an epidemic problem in native communities. The only solution
the state can “see” to ending gender and child abuse is the settler state.
What cannot be seen is the fact that such violence is the result of state
violence.
Similarly, many native activists who organize around sexual violence
in native communities frame their activist work from a decolonization
perspective, yet the solutions that emerge from that work usually result

30 Andrea Smith
in increased federal intervention in native communities, such as the re-
cent Tribal Law and Order Act that was passed in the wake of Amnesty
International’s report on sexual assault in Indian country, Maze of Injus-
tice (K. Robertson 2012). Of course, native activists who engage in such
policy work are not ignorant of the risks of advocating for changes in fed-
eral policies (Smith 2005b). They are aware of the contradiction of trying
to further the long-­term project of decolonization while attempting to
secure some measure of safety for survivors of violence in the short term.
They constantly struggle with the question of whether relying on state
surveillance even as a short-­term solution to violence diminishes the pos-
sibilities of developing alternative strategies which refuse settler colonial
logics in the long term.
It is important to note that the apparatus of settler colonial surveil-
lance does not impact only native peoples. The “normalizing” society
must necessarily inflict the logics of normalization on all peoples, not
just on those who are “oppressed.” If it were only the oppressed who were
subjected to normalizing logics, the logics would not seem “normal.” This
is why the intent of genocide is not just to destroy native peoples, but to
eliminate alternatives to the settler state for nonnative peoples. If alter-
natives to the white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal settler
state were to persist, the settler state’s status as the prototype for nor-
mal would be at risk. Settler logics inform both how violence against na-
tive women is addressed, as well as how gender violence in general is ad-
dressed. Furthermore, the mainstream antiviolence movement relies on
a settler framework for combating violence in ways that make it complicit
in the state’s surveillance strategies. These strategies then inform how
the mainstream movement manages and “sees” gender violence, while
simultaneously preventing it from seeing other approaches to ending vio-
lence. For example, at an antiviolence conference I attended, the partici-
pants supported the war in Afghanistan because they believed it would
liberate women from the violence of the Taliban; their reliance on state-­
driven surveillance strategies for addressing violence through the mili-
tary and criminal-­justice systems prevented them from seeing that mili-
tarism itself perpetuates violence against women.
One of the reasons for the antiviolence movement’s investment in the
state derives from its concerns with the private sphere. As Lyon notes,
much of the focus of surveillance studies is on “privacy”—how the state
monitors the individual lives of peoples.3 Of course, as feminist scholars
argue, the assumption that the protection of privacy is an unmediated

Not-Seeing 31
good is problematic, since the private sphere is where women are gener-
ally subjected to violence.4 And, as feminists of color in particular have
noted, not all women are equally entitled to privacy. Saidiya Hartman
points out that, on the one hand, the abuse and enslavement of African
Americans was often marked as taking place in the private sphere and
hence beyond the reach of the state to correct. And yet, paradoxically, the
private space of black families was seen as an extension of the workplace
and hence subject to police power (Hartman 1997, 160, 173). Anannya
Bhattacharjee similarly recounts an incident in which a domestic worker
complained to her social-­justice organization that she was being abused
by her white employer.5 When Bhattacharjee on behalf of the organization
contacted the police to report the incident, she was told that “if her orga-
nization tried to intervene by rescuing this person, that would be tres-
passing: In this case, the privacy of these wealthy employers’ home was
held to be inviolate, while the plight of an immigrant worker being held
in a condition of involuntary servitude was not serious enough to merit
police action. . . . The supposed privacy and sanctity of the home is a rela-
tive concept, whose application is heavily conditioned by racial and eco-
nomic status” (Bhattacharjee 2000, 29). As Patricia Allard notes, women
of color who receive public assistance are not generally deemed worthy of
privacy—they are subjected to the constant surveillance of the state. Of
course, all women seeking public services can be surveilled, but welfare is
generally racialized in the public imaginary through the figure of the “wel-
fare queen.” Andrea Ritchie (2006), Anannya Bhattacharjee (2001), and
other scholars document how women of color, particularly those who are
non-­gender conforming, who seek police intervention in cases of domes-
tic violence often find themselves subject to sexual assault, murder, and
other forms of police-­inflicted brutality.
If the private sphere is not a place of safety and refuge, what then
becomes the source of protection from violence in the home? The anti-
violence movement has generally relied on the state. As a result, there
is often a disconnect between racial-­justice and gender-­justice groups.
Racial-­justice groups focus on the state as an agent of violence from
which they need protection. Largely white antiviolence groups, and for
that matter, many women-­of-­color groups, have seen the state as the
solution to addressing intercommunal gender violence (Richie 1996).
As Bhattacharjee (2000) notes, this has put antiviolence groups in the
problematic position of marching against police brutality while simulta-
neously calling on the police to solve the problem of sexual/domestic vio-

32 Andrea Smith
lence as if it were two different institutions. As one example, I attended
a meeting of tribally based antiviolence advocates who were discussing
the need to address gender violence from the perspective of tribal sover-
eignty, and when the time came to develop actual strategies for address-
ing violence, the response was to call for more fbi agents on the reserva-
tion. Gender violence thus stands as the exception to the rule of opposing
state surveillance. In this setup, the state becomes the solution to vio-
lence, so antiviolence programs must adopt the surveillance strategies
of the state when they provide services. For instance, many domestic-­
violence shelters screen out women who are not documented, who have
criminal histories, who are sex workers, or who have substance-­abuse
issues. One advocate told me that her program did background searches
on potential clients and had them arrested if they had any outstanding
warrants!6 This, despite the fact that these women have warrants out for
their abusers and are trying to escape abusers who have forced them into
criminal activity. Moreover, shelters are often run like prisons. As Emi
Koyama brilliantly notes, women in shelters are constantly surveilled to
make sure they conform to the behavior deemed fitting by the shelter
staff. Koyama describes her experience in a shelter.
I am a survivor of domestic violence. I am someone who has stayed in
a shelter, back in 1994. My experience there was horrendous; I con-
stantly felt the policing gaze of shelter workers across the half-­open
door, and feared “warnings” and punishments that seemed to be
issued arbitrarily. No, to describe the practice as “arbitrary” would be
inaccurate; it was clearly selective in terms of who gets them most fre-
quently: the poor Black and Latina women with children, especially if
they are in “recovery” from alcohol or drug “abuse.” Snitching on other
residents was actively encouraged: residents were rewarded for report-
ing rule violations of other residents and their children, even when the
allegations were not exactly accurate. I did not know whom to trust.
Eventually, the feeling of constant siege by shelter staff and all the
“crazymaking” interactions pushed me over the edge, and I cut myself
with a knife. Not surprisingly, they put me in a mental hospital, effec-
tively ending my stay at the shelter before I could find a permanent,
safer space to live.
Eventually, Koyama became involved in the antiviolence movement,
where she worked for a shelter and found herself, against her politics,
sometimes engaging in the same policing activities. When a woman who

Not-Seeing 33
spoke Arabic called the shelter asking for services, Koyama’s supervi-
sor told her to tell the survivor that she needed to find another shelter.
Koyama complied.
This episode marked my last day working at the domestic violence
shelter, which is more than two years ago now, but I continue to ache
from this experience. Of course, this was not the first time that I ques-
tioned how shelters were being ran. I questioned everything: its “clean
and sober” policy regarding substance use, its policy against allow-
ing women to monitor their own medications, its use of threats and
intimidations to control survivors, its labeling of ordinary disagree-
ments or legitimate complaints as “disrespectful communication,” its
patronizing “life skills” and “parenting” classes, its seemingly random
enforcement of rules that somehow always push women of color out
of the shelter first. I hated just about everything that went on in a
shelter, and I refused to participate in most of these. I never issued
formal “warnings” against any of the residents, preferring instead to
have dialogs about any problems as casually as possible. I pretended
that I did not smell the alcohol in the women’s breaths so long as their
behaviors did not cause any problems for other residents. I never ever
walked a woman to the bathroom and watched her as she peed into a
little cup for drug tests, as the shelter policy expected of me to do. I did
everything I could to sabotage the system I viewed as abusive: I was
disloyal. But in many other situations, I failed. To this day, I ask my-
self why I did not simply ignore my supervisor’s order on that day, let
the woman come to the shelter and deal with the consequences later.
(Koyama 2006, 215)
Essentially, shelter staff take on the role of abusers or prison guards in
the lives of survivors.
Women-­of-­color advocates are in the difficult position of trying to dis-
mantle the structures of settler colonialism and white supremacy in the
long term, while securing safety for survivors of violence in the short
term. Under these conditions of immediate threat, women of color will
often become preoccupied with addressing immediate short-­term crises.
In addition, these state-­driven surveillance strategies for addressing vio-
lence force us to see violence in specific ways that foreclose the possibility
of seeing violence in other ways. In particular, these strategies frame sur-
vivors of violence as themselves the problem: survivors are “sick” and
require healing from a professional who will monitor their behavior to

34 Andrea Smith
ensure that they are healing properly. Those who do not “heal” are no
longer deemed worthy of this “antiviolence” project. Thus, by seeing gen-
der violence through the lens of the state, we can only see survivors as
clients who need services, rather than as potential organizers who might
dismantle social structures of violence.
Indigenous feminism reshapes the manner in which we engage sur-
veillance studies, demonstrating that focus on the surveillance strate-
gies of the state obscure the fact that the state is itself a surveillance
strategy. There is not a pure or benign state beyond its strategies of sur-
veillance. Yet, the state, rather than being recognized for its complicity in
gender violence, has become the institution promising to protect women
from domestic and sexual violence by providing a provisional “sanctuary”
of sorts from the now criminally defined “other” that is the perpetrator
of gender violence (Richie 2000). As I have argued elsewhere (A. Smith
2005a), the state is largely responsible for introducing gender violence
into indigenous communities as part of a colonial strategy that follows
a logic of sexual violence. Gender violence becomes the mechanism by
which U.S. colonialism is effectively and pervasively exerted on native na-
tions (A. Smith 2005a). The complicity of the state in perpetrating gen-
der violence in other communities of color, through slavery, prisons, and
border patrol, is also well documented (Bhattacharjee 2001; Davis 2003,
1981; A. Smith 2005b).
The state actually has no interest in gender or racial justice, since state
laws are often, in practice, used against the people they supposedly pro-
tect. For instance, the New York Times recently reported that the effects
of the strengthened anti-­domestic violence legislation is that battered
women kill their abusive partners less frequently; however, batterers
do not kill their partners less frequently, and this is more true in black
than in white communities (Butterfield 2000). With mandatory arrest
laws, police officers frequently arrest those being battered rather than
batterers. Thus, laws passed to protect battered women are actually pro-
tecting their batterers! Many scholars have analyzed the ineffectiveness
of the criminal-­justice system in addressing gender violence, particularly
against poor women, women of color, sex workers, and queer communi-
ties (Richie 1996; A. Smith 2005b; Sokoloff 2005). The mainstream anti-
violence movement’s reliance on policies embedded in state violence to
solve the problem of gender violence depends on what David Kazanjian
(2003) refers to as the “colonizing trick”: the liberal myth that the United
States was founded on democratic principles that have eroded through

Not-Seeing 35
post-­9/11 policies, which obfuscates how the state was built on the pillars
of capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy.
Reliance on state surveillance prevents us from seeing other possibili-
ties for ending violence, such as through communal organization that
might be able to address violence more effectively. This is apparent in the
mandate of much surveillance studies, which tends to focus on curtail-
ing state surveillance without questioning the state itself. Consequently,
this work does not explore possibilities for different forms of governance,
ones not based on the logics of patriarchal and colonial surveillance. The
work of indigenous activists to develop indigenous nations that are not
based on the principles of domination, violence, and control cannot be
seen—even by antiviolence activists (A. Smith 2008). An evocative ex-
ample is an experience I had working with the group Incite! Women of
Color Against Violence. I was conducting a workshop on community ac-
countability. We were discussing the following question: if there was vio-
lence in your community, is there anything you could do that would not
involve primarily working with the police? During this discussion, one
woman stated that she lived in an apartment complex in which a man was
battering his partner. She did not know what do to do, because she did not
trust the police, but she also did not want the abuse to continue. Her com-
ment made me realize how much our reliance on the state has impacted
not only survivors of violence but also people who might think to inter-
vene. It did not occur to this woman—nor might it necessarily occur to
many of us in a similar situation—to organize in the apartment complex
to do something. The only potential interveners in this situation seems to
be ourselves as individuals or the state. It seems like our only response is
either a privatized response to violence or a communal one that is state-­
driven. The result is that not only do we not “see” other solutions to the
problem of violence, but we also become absolved from having to see the
violence in the first place. Essentially, the apparatus of state surveillance,
which allows the state to see violence, absolves us from the responsibility
of having to see it.
A feminist approach to surveillance studies highlights not only the
strategies of the state, but how people have internalized these same
strategies, and it asks us to rethink our investment in the state. Without
this intervention, the state is presumed to be our protector; we should
only modify the manner in which the state protects. For example, dur-
ing a survey I conducted for the Department of Justice on tribal com-
munities’ response to sexual assault, I found that most communities had

36 Andrea Smith
not developed a response, because they assumed the federal government
was taking care of the problem. In fact, as Amnesty International later
documented, the federal government very rarely prosecuted sexual as-
sault crimes in Indian country (Amnesty International 2007). Because of
an investment in the state, tribal governments had not invested in their
own possibilities for addressing violence.
When one asks the question “What can I do?,” the answer is likely to
call the police or to do nothing. But when one asks the question “What
can we do?,” a whole range of other possibilities arises. In fact, groups
around the country have asked that question and have developed a
variety of community-­accountability models that do not rely primarily
on police involvement (Chen et al. 2011).7 Similarly, many native activ-
ists, such as Sarah Deer (2009), are active in organizing tribal communi-
ties to develop their own responses to sexual violence. Of course, all of
these models have their own challenges. For example, will community-­
accountability models simply adopt the same strategies used by the state
to address violence? How might these models develop without a romanti-
cized notion of “community” that is not sexist, homophobic, or otherwise
problematic—or the potentially problematic assumption that a “commu-
nity” even exists in the first place? How might they address the immedi-
ate needs of survivors who may still require state intervention, even as
they seek to eventually replace the state? These questions and others con-
tinue to inform the development of the community-­accountability move-
ment (Chen et al. 2011).
After 9/11, even radical scholars framed George Bush’s policies as an
attack on the U.S. Constitution. According to Judith Butler, Bush’s poli-
cies were acts against “existing legal frameworks, civil, military, and inter-
national” (2004, 57). Amy Kaplan similarly describes Bush’s policies as
rendering increasingly more peoples under U.S. jurisdiction as “less de-
serving of . . . constitutional rights” (2005, 853). Thus, Bush’s strategies
were deemed a suspension of law. Progressive activists and scholars ac-
cused him of eroding U.S. democracy and civil liberties. Under this frame-
work, progressives are called in to uphold the law, defend U.S. democracy,
and protect civil liberties against “unconstitutional” actions. Surveillance
studies often carries similar presumptions. That is, this field is concerned
with the “rapidly increasing influence of surveillance in our daily lives
and in the operation of very large-­scale operations” (Lyon 2007, 9). It is
concerned with what is presumed to be the increasing erosion of civil lib-
erties and the loss of privacy that this surveillance entails. It takes the

Not-Seeing 37
state for granted, but is concerned that the state not overstep its proper
boundaries. And yet, from the perspective of indigenous peoples, the eye
of the state has always been genocidal, because the problem is not pri-
marily the surveillance strategies of the state, but the state itself.
If we were to employ a settler colonial analytic, we would see the growth
in surveillance strategies less as a threat to the democratic ideals of the
United States than as a fulfillment of them. As these surveillance strate-
gies grow, they impact everyone, not just native peoples, because the logic
of settler colonialism structures the world for everyone. In particular, sur-
veillance strategies not only allow the state to see certain things, but pre-
vent us from seeing the state as the settler colonial, white supremacist,
and heteropatriarchal formation that it is.

Notes

1. See Byrd 2011; Byron 2002; Han 2011; Wynter 1997.

2. See, for instance, Allen 1986; Anderson 1993; Namias 1993; A. Smith 2005a.
3. Lyon does note, “But privacy is both contested, and confined in its scope. Cul-
turally and historically relative, privacy has limited relevance in some contexts”
(2007, 19).
4. See, for example, Bhattacharjee 2001b; D. Roberts 1991.
5. Out of respect for person involved and in keeping with organizational con-
fidentiality policies, Bhattacharjee does not give extended details of the incident.
6. Personal conversation, 12 February 2002. The advocate with whom I spoke
does not wish to have her program identified.
7. Community-­accountability models do not presume that we can expect to en-
gage in “pure” strategies untainted by the current system. The goal is not to tell
survivors that they can never call the police or engage the criminal-­justice system.
The question is not whether a survivor should call the police. The question is why
we have given survivors no option but to call the police.

38 Andrea Smith
 2
SURVEILLANCE AND THE WORK
OF ANTITRAFFICKING
From Compulsory Examination to International Coordination

LAURA HYUN YI KANG

By hailing different configurations of women as objects and subjects of

surveillance, the long history of efforts to uncover and combat the “traf-
fic in women” offers an instructive case for feminist surveillance studies
at this important moment of field formation. If a feminist critique and
modification of an already existing yet discernibly unfeminist surveil-
lance studies through a focused attention on women under surveillance
is the task at hand, we might attend to how public outcry against the
traffic in women has activated and rationalized state scrutiny and con-
trol over female bodies when it comes to disease, sexuality, morality, and
labor. The Contagious Disease Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) in England created
a “morality police” and authorized officers to subject women suspected
of prostitution to compulsory “surgical examination” for venereal dis-
ease and forced confinement in a “lock hospital” if they were infected.
This example reminds us to bear in mind the historical layers of targeted
material-­corporeal violence that conditions more contemporary techno-
logically mediated and disembodied modes of surveillance.
The history of antitrafficking compels attention to the transnational
and racist dimensions of the surveillance of women. The practices of com-
pulsory examination, treatment, and detention of local women were a
crucial component of British colonial administration throughout Asia in
the early 1800s. With the spread of imperial settlements and the surge of
international labor migrations in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, borders and transit hubs such as ports and railway stations came to
be seen as dangerous vectors in the transmission of disease, especially
from the colonies to the metropoles. While the sensationalist discourse
of “white slave traffic” engendered sympathetic figurations of female vul-
nerability, it also fueled and justified suspicious regard of traveling female
bodies. Alarm about the high rates of venereal diseases among soldiers
in the First World War (1914–1918) galvanized a new round of concerted
state actions to monitor and regulate transnational female movement
and sexual labor (Gorman 2008, 200).
The early history of antitrafficking includes determined efforts by cer-
tain women to contest state tactics of state surveillance as discrimina-
tory and dehumanizing in what we might identify as a determinedly anti-
surveillance feminism. An oft-­repeated account traces the origin of the
international movement against the “traffic in women” to the concerted
opposition to the Contagious Disease Acts. On the other hand, if we fol-
low the suggestion of Ummni Khan’s essay in this volume, where a dis-
tinctive form of “feminist surveillance” is the phenomenon under critical
scrutiny, we should attend to how the antitrafficking work of women so-
cial reformers and feminist activists have aided and abetted state scrutiny
and control over both female and male bodies. The feminist project of
making women and gender visible within and across numerous disci-
plines and interdisciplinary studies is rendered especially contradictory
when articulated in terms of a knowledge field that starts off from the
problematization of visibility as a mode of subjection and regulation. Sur-
veillance betrays and degrades the liberatory promise of visibility.
Then too, trafficking frustrates the sweeping reach of surveillance. As
one of the most hyperbolized and enduring subjects of journalistic expo-
sés, academic scholarship, government investigations, and international
relations, the traffic in women bears an immense and prolific archive of
documentation and analysis. However, as activists, policymakers, and
academic experts have repeatedly pointed out, the clandestine, coercive,
dispersed, and mobile aspects of trafficking resist unequivocal verifica-
tion and clear representation. The archive of antitrafficking offers up a
long, jagged history of both diverse surveillance rationales and tactics, as
well as multiple surveillance failures and impossibilities. In this essay I
argue that a persistent racist preoccupation with the fate of white women
demarcates one such fault line. Even as the invocation of a generic “traf-

40 Laura Hyun Yi Kang

fic in women and girls” in the early twentieth century expanded the reach
of the problem and the corresponding modalities of vigilance, state and
civil surveillance of trafficking have always been differentially entrained
on different female bodies as vulnerable or dangerous.
The work of antitrafficking in the League of Nations during the inter-
war period is particularly instructive for examining the multiple contra-
dictions outlined above. The League served as an important historical and
institutional pivot between the imperial regimes carried over from the
nineteenth century and the post-­Second World War emergence of newly
decolonized countries and the global governance regime associated with
the United Nations. In the aftermath of the First World War, the traffic
in women occasioned a compelling rationale and platform for the coming
together of nations with divergent interests, shifting borders, and un-
equal resources. From its inception, the League of Nations was engaged
with addressing the traffic as an urgent and indisputably international
problem. Article 23c of its covenant thus “entrusted the League with the
general supervision over the execution of agreements with regard to the
traffic in women and children.” Calibrating the surveillance of women’s
cross-­border movements among states and nongovernmental organi-
zations was crucial to the incipient conceptualization and enactment
of international cooperation. From 30 June to 1 July 1921, the League
convened an International Conference on the Traffic in Women and Chil-
dren in Geneva. In his opening speech, the Belgian foreign minister Paul
Hymans heralded the occasion: “Hitherto treaties of peace have only dealt
with questions of frontiers, indemnities and commercial and financial
interests. For the first time in the history of humanity other interests are
therein included and among them the dignity of human labor and the re-
spect for women and children” (quoted in Metzger 2007, 59). In the spirit
of this new internationalism, it was suggested that the phrase “traffic
in women and children” replace “white slavery,” thereby “making it clear
that measures adopted should be applied to all races alike” (League of Na-
tions 1927, 8). Such universalizing platitudes obscured the imperial gene-
alogy, with its persistent racial demarcations and national interests, of
the discriminating and targeted surveillance of women’s bodies, sexuality,
work, and migration. In principle, the framing of the traffic in women as
a global human problem necessitating international cooperation and co-
ordination rendered these member states and their varied laws and poli-
cies regarding sex work, labor, age of consent, emigration, and immigra-
tion the target of a new supranational regime of surveillance, judgment,

Surveillance and Antitrafficking 41

and proper accreditation. This framing held out the potential of clarifying
the uneven sexual economies and topographies, which had been carved
out by racism, patriarchy, and competing empires. In practice, however,
even after the move to replace “white slave traffic” with the more neutral
and inclusive “traffic in women,” a distinction and separation continued
between “white women” and their racialized others. Persistent racial ob-
sessions and racist blind spots impeded and exposed the limits of the
League’s attempts to coordinate international policy and action against
the traffic in women by implementing what were deemed newly effective
modes of undercover surveillance and expert data gathering.
On 15 December 1920, the Assembly of the League of Nations adopted
several linked resolutions. In addition to urging those governments who
had signed the 1904 agreement and the 1910 Convention for the Sup-
pression of White Slave Traffic to put them into operation “immediately,”
another resolution called on the League’s Council to convene an Inter-
national Conference of Traffic in Women and Children, which would be
charged with the “task of endeavouring to harmonise the opinions of
the different Governments in order that common action may be taken”
(League of Nations 1921b, 596). Toward that end, the Assembly authorized
the Secretariat to issue to all member states a questionnaire that inquired
about domestic laws regarding trafficking, the penalties prescribed for
specific cases, and statistics for prosecutions and convictions. The 1921
International Conference in Geneva concluded with the recommendation
that each member nation submit annual reports on both the traffic in
their territories and their domestic antitrafficking efforts. The League of
Nations thus took on the role of an international clearinghouse. It also
passed a new, more expansive International Convention for the Suppres-
sion of the Traffic in Women and Children in September 1921, which in-
creased the age of consent of women engaged in prostitution from twenty
to twenty-­one. The League also appointed a permanent Advisory Com-
mittee on the Traffic of Women and Children, comprising nine national
“delegates” and five “assessors,” each representing an international vol-
untary organization. When the League sponsored its own official investi-
gation of the traffic in the 1920s, it proceeded in two stages and resulted
in two separate publications. The first, published in 1927 and titled Report
of the Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Children (hereafter,
the 1927 Report), comprised 270 pages. The second report, published in
1932 and titled Commission of Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in
the East (hereafter, the 1932 Report), was much longer, at 556 pages. Paul

42 Laura Hyun Yi Kang

Knepper has hailed the two inquiries together as not only “the first world-
wide study of human trafficking” but also “the first ever social scientific
study of a global social problem” (2011, 96).
The 1927 Report was notable for inaugurating the use of a traveling
commission, which comprised specially trained “experts” who visited 112
cities and districts across twenty-­eight countries to conduct “on the spot”
inquiries. In addition to producing first-­person observations of local con-
ditions, these experts interviewed over 6,500 individuals, including gov-
ernment officials, law-­enforcement officers, and antitrafficking voluntary
associations in these locations. The commission also relied on undercover
investigations by specially contracted agents and sometimes met directly
with members of the “underworld,” including procurers, madams, and
prostitutes, in order to uncover “facts” that might be hidden or misrep-
resented by official statistics and national reports. Thus, the 1927 Report
was held up at the time as having “revolutionized League methods in the
investigation of social problems” (Boeckel 1929, 234).
Three specific aspects of these two reports compromise the claims
to both their international expansiveness and their empirical innova-
tions. First, both reports were blatantly concerned with the fate of white
women. The 1932 Report is especially striking on this point in its clear
demarcation between “Traffic in Occidental Women in Asia” and “Traffic
in Asian Women” and in its unabashed concern about the sexual fate of
Russian women refugees in China. This provides evidence that the im-
perialist, racist, and nationalist foundations of early British state regula-
tion of and voluntary vigilance against prostitution from the nineteenth
century preconditioned the later antitrafficking work of the League of
Nations. Second, there was a specifically American genealogy for the 1927
Report’s use of “on the spot” and “undercover” investigations, which had
been deployed earlier as part of the “social hygiene” movement in the
United States. Third, there were substantive differences in methodology
and composition between the two reports, which demonstrate the episte-
mological blind spots imposed by persistent racialist and racist thinking.

The League’s racially motivated and demarcated handling of the traffic in

women must be framed in relation to a longer history of imperial expan-
sion, labor exploitation, and gendered labor migration in the nineteenth
century. Well before the domestic enactment of the Contagious Disease

Surveillance and Antitrafficking 43

Acts in England in the 1860s, the practices of medical surveillance, forced
treatment, and physical isolation of women were a crucial component
of British colonial administration throughout Asia in the early 1800s.
A lock hospital was established in the Madras presidency in 1805, and
others could be found throughout the British Empire in Asia, including
in Penang, in the Malay Peninsula (Burton 1994, 130). In her compre-
hensive study Prostitution, Race, and Politics, Philippa Levine writes, “It
is in India, however, that we see the workings of the early system most
vividly.” Levine continues: “William Burke, inspector general of hospitals
for the army in India, outlined his ideal plan in 1827: a register of pros-
titutes; their compulsory examination fortnightly, with certification for
the healthy and hospitalization for the infected; and punitive measures
for women failing to appear for examination. These principles would be-
come the core of the empire wide regime enacted three decades later”
(2003, 38).1 Thereafter, Hong Kong’s Ordinance No. 12 was passed, in 1857,
which mandated brothel registration and regular medical examination.
Since “the ultimate goal of regulated prostitution was to provide ‘clean
native women’ for foreign military personnel,” the ordinances in Hong
Kong were “effectively limited to Asian women servicing foreigners”
(Scully 2001, 81–82). British-­administered lock hospitals could also be
found throughout Asia, including treaty ports in Japan.
In addition to the presence of British colonists and soldiers through-
out Asia, several significant migrations in the nineteenth century shaped
the peculiar contours of the 1932 Report. A migratory route of women
who were “typically already professional sex workers” from Europe and
the U.S. to China began with the Opium War (1841–1842) and accelerated
after the introduction of steamship travel and the opening of the Suez
Canal, in 1869 (Scully 2001, 79). The rapid economic development of port
cities like Hong Kong and Singapore was accompanied by the growth of
large red-­light districts employing mostly Chinese and Japanese women,
which were tolerated by colonial authorities as a “necessary evil” to pla-
cate the large population of migrant male laborers (Warren 1993, 34). In
her account of the “traffic in sexual labor,” Eileen Scully (2001) includes
Chinese women’s immigration to the United States in the 1840s as an
early example of the traffic, and she further points to the presence of
Chinese and Japanese women in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Aus-
tralia, and South Africa by the late 1800s. Borders, ports, and other tran-
sit zones came to be regarded as especially dangerous and were closely
monitored to ward off diseases. The increasingly vociferous discourse of

44 Laura Hyun Yi Kang

venereal disease as a “racial poison” and a “racial threat” in the 1860s co-
incided with an actual decline in infections (Levine 2003, 5). This setup
expressed anxieties about racial purity in the face of both increased white
female emigration and the immigration of nonwhite others.
The authors of the 1927 Report acknowledge its link to earlier strands
of antitrafficking work and its internationalization, which began in Eng-
land and Western Europe in the nineteenth century. In 1869 Josephine
Butler and other reformers founded the Ladies National Association
(lna) for the Repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts. Regarding the com-
pulsory physical examinations as “symbolic rape,” the lna “meticulously
kept track of the number of examinations in which no venereal disease
was discovered” and considered them to be “the central inequity of the
Acts” (Bristow 1977, 82–83). Butler later established the British, Conti-
nental, and General Abolitionist Federation, in 1875, which extended the
movement to abolish licensed brothels to the continent, since it was be-
lieved that the system of state-­regulated prostitution in certain conti-
nental countries like France encouraged and facilitated the cross-­national
trafficking of women and girls. The federation convened an International
Congress in 1877 and played a crucial role in sponsoring and financially
underwriting targeted and on-­the-­ground investigations of the traffic.
The 1927 Report mentions how their efforts led to an official British in-
quiry into the traffic of women and girls to the continent, which in turn
resulted in the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment, as a model precedent for
how concerted investigations could lead to effective regulation.
After the repeal of domestic laws in 1889, the continued use of
contagious-­diseases ordinances in the British colonies and protectorates
shifted the focus of antitrafficking measures to these overseas territo-
ries. The British, Continental, and General Abolitionist Federation was
renamed the British Committee for the Abolition of the State Regulated
Vice in India and throughout the British Dominions. In addition to inter-
viewing soldiers returning from abroad, the organization employed both
paid agents and voluntary supporters, who conducted investigations in
India in 1891 and 1892, and also in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and the Straits
Settlements (Levine 2003, 104). The work of antitrafficking enjoined and
enabled certain Anglo American women to participate actively in an early
form of transnational knowledge production that predated and presaged
the League of Nations inquiries. In 1882 Butler personally encouraged the
American missionaries Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Bush-
nell, of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, to undertake an onsite

Surveillance and Antitrafficking 45

investigation of trafficking and regulated brothels in India, which was
later published as The Queen’s Daughters in India (1899). Andrew and Bush-
nell reported that “regulation was rampant and that Indian women sub-
mitted rather than face expulsion from the cantonments” (Burton 1994,
136). It is significant to note that their vigilant gaze was also trained on
the imperial state and its “sanctioning of incorrigible soldierly behavior”
(Levine 2003, 104).
In the 1890s there emerged another strand of antitrafficking work in
Britain that was affiliated with social-­purity reformers, who advocated
for the state oversight and regulation of prostitution. The National Vigi-
lance Association (nva) began to organize an international campaign
against “white slave traffic” and garnered the support and endorsement
of state officials. It also convened an International Congress on White
Slave Traffic in London, in June 1899, which the 1927 Report hailed as
“the starting-­point of a complete organization for defensive and active
measures against the traffic” (League of Nations 1927, 8). The nva spear-
headed a new organization, named the International Bureau (ib) for the
Suppression of the Traffic in Women, which fostered “a close and perma-
nent agreement . . . among the philanthropic and charitable societies of
different countries to communicate to each other information as to the
emigration of women under suspicious circumstances, and to undertake
to protect the emigrants on their arrival.”2 The various national commit-
tees of the ib became actively engaged in the work of monitoring and
managing the transnational movements of European women. In addi-
tion to being prominently led by men, the nva and the ib cultivated and
enjoyed a close relationship to the state. They received some financial
support from their respective governments and also worked with law en-
forcement and immigration officials in the exclusion and repatriation of
foreign women suspected of being prostitutes (Limoncelli 2006, 51). Such
heightened vigilance did not, however, translate into increased protec-
tion of women from exploitation. Writing of the period from 1895 to the
First World War, Scully points out, “Policing and regulatory responses
exacerbated the situation, as migratory prostitutes under siege became
more reliant on pimps and more vulnerable to corrupt officials” (Scully
2001, 84).
The ib played a leading role in coordinating the first International
Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, which was
signed on 18 May 1904, as well as the 1910 International Convention for
the Suppression of White Slave Traffic, which the League of Nations later

46 Laura Hyun Yi Kang

adopted and expanded. Under the auspices of antitrafficking, both the
1904 and 1910 documents asserted the signatory state’s responsibility for
monitoring the transnational movement of girls and women. According
to Article 1 of the 1904 Agreement, the signatory countries would “estab-
lish or name some authority charged with the co-­ordination of all infor-
mation relative to the procuring of women or girls for immoral purposes
abroad” (League of Nations 1927, 197). Article 2 called for the parties “to
have a watch kept, especially in railways stations, ports of embarkation,
and en route, for persons in charge of women and girls destined for an
immoral life” (ibid.). This concerted surveillance over traveling female
bodies was later incorporated almost verbatim in the questionnaire that
the League of Nations circulated in 1921: “4. Has the government taken
any steps to have ports and railway stations watched for the purpose
of checking the Traffic in Women and Children? If not undertaking this
duty to themselves, have they delegated this responsibility, and if so, to
what agency?” (League of Nations 1921a, 230). Articles 3 and 4 of the 1904
Agreement, which addressed the matter of the repatriation of “women
and girls of foreign nationality who are prostitutes,” were incorporated as
question 5: “Has the Government taken steps to ascertain from foreign
prostitutes the reasons for which they left their countries? If so, what has
been the outcome of this enquiry?” (ibid.). The internationalization of
the work of antitrafficking necessitated the move from “white slave traf-
fic” to the more universal rubric of the “traffic in women and children,”
but much of the discourse and subsequent work of the League of Nations
maintained a hierarchical racial distinction. Question 8 in the 1921 ques-
tionnaire explicitly focused on protective measures against “White Slave
Traffic.” Several annual government reports also continued to deploy the
term. The persistence of the use of the term white slave traffic was not
residual but crucial to the fashioning of international consensus in an
era marked by both imperialist jockeying and uneven nation formations.
In proposing a new International Convention for the Suppression of the
Traffic in Women and Children at the second meeting of the Assembly of
the League in September 1921, the British delegation framed it as “an un-
precedented opportunity for the League to demonstrate political will and
determination” (Metzger 2007, 60). The 1921 Convention bore a notable
exception in its Article 14: “Any Member or State signing the present Con-
vention may declare that the signature does not include any or all of its
colonies, overseas possessions, protectorates or territories under its sov-
ereignty or authority, and may subsequently adhere separately on behalf

Surveillance and Antitrafficking 47

of any such colony, overseas possession, protectorate or territory so ex-
cluded in its declaration.” Thus, the very assertion of a new international
agreement entailed explicit sanctions of imperial “double standards” im-
posed onto different women’s bodies.

II

The exercise of the League’s “political will and determination” was further
complicated by the unknowable contours of the purported problem. Traf-
ficking is difficult to espy, document, and control. The two reports and the
archives of the League of Nations Official Journal repeatedly demonstrate
a fissure between convincing demonstrations of diligent surveillance and
acknowledgment of the impossibility of a thorough monitoring and docu-
mentation of the phenomenon. Since the League, and especially its Social
Section which included the Advisory Committee on the Traffic of Women
and Children, lacked the financial resources and administrative structure
to gather specific details about local and national conditions, it was still
largely dependent on official government communiqués and “field re-
ports” submitted by voluntary associations such as the ib. There was the
possibility for underreporting the extent and severity of the conditions
by state authorities. Pointing to how several of the countries represented
on the advisory committee, including France, Italy, and Japan, did not
move toward abolition in practice, Jessica Pliley goes so far as to assert
“that many governments wanted to appear [to be] actively addressing
the problem of trafficking without having to take any meaningful action”
(2010, 105–6). Further complicating questions of objectivity and account-
ability, Great Britain, France, Portugal, Japan, the Netherlands, and the
United States submitted replies and reports on behalf of their colonies,
overseas possessions, protectorates, or territories.3 As well, in the first
decades of the twentieth century, many nations were in the active and
contested process of state-­building, making it difficult to attribute such
reports to a single, organized bureaucratic agency. In her study of prosti-
tution in Shanghai in the early twentieth century, Gail Hershatter points
out that “no systematic statistics were collected” and further questions
the record-­keeping practices of the state: “Counting, like classifying and
regulating, is not a neutral activity. The creation of statistics, in Shanghai
as elsewhere, was part of a state-­building process, an intrusive aspect of
the project of modernity, often resisted by the people it sought to incor-
porate. Numbers that give the impression of precision were collected by

48 Laura Hyun Yi Kang

an inconsistent group for changing reasons from a population that had
every reason to lie” (1997, 38). There was also some skepticism about the
“field reports” of voluntary organizations, a tendency to dismiss them as
exaggerated and sensationalistic.
On 21 March 1923, Grace Abbott, an advisory-­committee representa-
tive from the United States, submitted a memorandum recommending a
new international enquiry sponsored by the League. Its scope would be
ambitiously broad and multidimensional.
Geographically the investigation should include, if possible, the princi-
pal cities of the world, but, if this is not possible, typical cities should
be selected from which there is reason to believe the traffic is or is not
being carried on, those in which regulated houses and those in which
abolition is the policy, those situated in countries in which prostitutes
and all those who live or benefit by prostitution are excluded from ad-
mission, and those whose laws regulating immigration make no or in-
adequate provisions for immoral persons. (League of Nations 1927, 50)
Note how three different kinds of cities were delineated according to state
regulations regarding prostitution and immigration restriction, suggest-
ing that an assessment of the efficacy of state regulation itself was at
stake. The rubric of “traffic in women” thus enabled a more far-­reaching
and probing investigation into a broad range of national laws and en-
forcement mechanisms. Abbott went on to call for the need for an on-­the-­
ground investigation to supplement the limits of the information pro-
vided by governments and voluntary associations.
From official sources, the facts as to the administration of laws de-
signed to eliminate the traffic can be learned. To secure the informa-
tion as to the traffic itself, it will be necessary to send to the cities in-
cluded in the survey, agents of high standing with special training and
experience to make personal and unofficial investigations. It is recog-
nised that such investigations are difficult, not to say dangerous; but
they are absolutely necessary to secure the facts to refute sensational
exaggerations or general denials as to the traffic and—what would
seem to be for the Committee of supreme importance—an intelligent
basis for a sound programme for international co-­operation for the
suppression of the traffic, if it is found to exist. (Ibid.)
Having earned a master’s degree in political science from the University of
Chicago and worked with Jane Adams at Hull House, Abbott was a promi-

Surveillance and Antitrafficking 49

nent member of a new generation of social workers who “crafted their
professional identities and asserted their expertise by embracing scien-
tific practice methods, with an emphasis on investigation, detailed case
records, scientific nomenclature, and social diagnosis” (Kennedy 2008,
28). Before serving as the director of the Immigrant’s Protective League
and being appointed as the first chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, Abbott
had published numerous articles, in such venues as the American Journal
of Sociology, on a range of issues, including immigrant labor, social wel-
fare, child labor, and juvenile delinquency. Thus, her important role in
proposing these investigations demonstrate the early twentieth-­century
commingling and cooperation of the state, the university, and private
philanthropy in the work of surveillance over certain women’s bodies.
In addition to Abbott’s instigation, the leading position of U.S. actors
in overseeing and funding this investigation merits closer scrutiny, espe-
cially given that the United States was not a formal member of the League
of Nations. As proof and as a model of the efficaciousness of the inves-
tigation, Abbott invoked in the memorandum a U.S. Senate inquiry on
the “Importation and Harbouring of Women for Immoral Purposes” in
1908–1909, which found that women and girls from Europe and also
from Asia were brought to the United States. She stated that “the au-
thorities charged with the enforcement of American law as well as private
organisations in the United States interested in the abolition of prosti-
tution will, I am sure, be glad to give all possible assistance” (League of
Nations 1927, 50). As appreciatively acknowledged in the introduction to
the 1927 Report, both multinational investigations were made possible by
donations from the American Bureau of Social Hygiene, which provided
$75,000 and then $125,000, respectively, to the two inquiries. The Bureau
of Social Hygiene (bsh) was established in 1913 by John D. Rockefeller
Jr. and fellow “social purity” reformers as a private philanthropic organi-
zation devoted to investigating and combating prostitution. Rockefeller
had previously served as the chair of a special grand jury commissioned
by the County of New York, in 1910, to investigate the “organized traf-
fic in women for immoral purposes.” Subsequently, he envisioned that
“this permanent organization, small and operating in relative secrecy,
would have some power to effect a solution to the social evil that a more
open democratic process would not have” (Gunn 1999, 104). In contrast
to the moralism and sensationalism of the earlier purity crusades against
the “white slave traffic,” the bsh sought to achieve “instrumental reform
that was efficient, scientific, elitist” by engaging trained experts to study

50 Laura Hyun Yi Kang

social problems such as prostitution and venereal disease (Brandt 1987,
39). Before providing financial support for the League’s inquiries into the
traffic in women, the bsh funded investigations into prostitution in the
United States and Europe and published the findings (Kneeland 1913;
Flexner 1914; Woolston, 1921). The bsh also financed social programs,
such as the Laboratory of Social Hygiene in Bedford Hills: “Women sen-
tenced to this reformatory underwent a battery of physical and psycho-
logical tests aimed at isolating factors which contributed to prostitution”
(Brandt 1987, 39). Thus, the emerging methods of the social sciences came
to supplement and legitimate rather than supplant older private and pub-
lic modes of discipline and punishment.
The bsh also funded the American Social Hygiene Association (asha),
which merged two older organizations, the American Federation for Sex
Hygiene and the American Vigilance Association, and focused on com-
bating venereal disease through sex education. The asha was led by
William F. Snow, a professor and public-­health expert, and included Jane
Addams, a close mentor to Abbott. The asha applied what it consid-
ered “forward-­looking scientific approaches” and private investigators
to uncover and document pressing social problems such as prostitution
(Knepper 2012, 7). Snow also served as chairman of the League of Na-
tion’s Special Body of Experts on the Traffic in Women and Children from
1924 to 1928. He, in turn, was responsible for the appointment of Bas-
com Johnson, who had served as head of the legal affairs at asha and
as the director of investigations of the two enquiries. During the First
World War, both Snow and Johnson successfully worked with the U.S.
Army Commission on Training Camp Activities to control the epidemic of
venereal diseases by closing down or moving red-­light districts that were
near military encampments.4 Their efforts were related to a nationwide
wave of vice commissions in the 1910s, whose investigations led to more
repressive laws and policies against women suspected of engaging in
prostitution: “Many states established reformatories for women . . . and
required medical examinations for venereal diseases prior to marriage”
(Lubove 1962, 328). Snow had also served as the vice president of the
American Eugenics Society. Eugenicist ideologies of “racial preservation”
through forced sterilization and immigration restriction were expressed
in the asha’s Journal of Social Hygiene. One article begins, “For any coun-
try at any given stage of advancement of its arts, and of exhaustion of its
resources, there is an optimum number of inhabitants up to which the
country can continue to increase its population without producing an un-

Surveillance and Antitrafficking 51

due pressure upon subsistence. . . . A well-­ordered community will strive
to reach this adjustment. It may do so by encouraging or discouraging
emigration, or by raising or lowering the birth-­rate” (R. H. Johnson 1919,
223). Another article, titled “Eugenical Sterilization in the United States,”
argues that “the relation between the inheritable qualities of our immi-
grants and the destiny of the American nation is very close. . . . Thus, if the
American nation desires to upbuild or even to maintain its standard of
natural qualities, it must forbid the addition through immigration to our
human breeding-­stock of persons of a lower natural hereditary constitu-
tion than that which constitutes the desired standard” (Laughlin 1920,
530–31).
The significance of monitoring immigration was prominent in the ex-
panded “Questionnaire issued by the special body of experts on the traf-
fic in women and children” on 3 April 1924, which was printed as annex 2
of the 1927 Report. In addition to requesting government statistics on
the “number, age, nationality and length of residence of foreign women
who are known to be regularly engaged in prostitution, either in licensed
houses or elsewhere,” the lengthy, multipart question 5 asks for “any
available statistics regarding immigration and emigration for the years
1919–1923,” including the “total number of male and female immigrants
classified according to nationality,” and it specifies “foreign women who
have been admitted in the last five years . . . classified according to age-­
group (under 18, 18–21, 21–30, and over 30), and according to occupa-
tions” (League of Nations 1927, 196).
The determining influence of this distinctly U.S. preoccupation with
prostitution, immigration, and racial purity in shaping the 1927 enquiry
was largely eclipsed by highlighting the incontrovertible rigor of direct
observation of “facts” by trained experts. The inclusion of professional
women such as Alma Sundquist of Sweden, a physician who served on the
three-­member traveling commission, further provided an aura of legiti-
macy. Even as the authors of the 1927 Report ceremoniously acknowl-
edged “the most cordial response” from all the countries that were inves-
tigated, “with the result that the representatives of the Body of Experts
were given every facility on carrying out their work and received the
active help of officials and other persons concerned” (League of Nations
1927, 5), the authenticity and reliability of these independent “expert”
observations were repeatedly upheld. Pointing to how Bascom Johnson’s
“legal training and long experience of social studies proved invaluable,”
the authors added that the commission was “assisted by a group of highly

52 Laura Hyun Yi Kang

qualified investigators” (ibid.). The undercover methods used had been
refined in the earlier anti-­vice campaigns in the United States. Of the
mostly U.S. male field operatives Johnson employed, Paul Kinsie, who di-
rected the asha’s undercover research program, played an especially key
role. In his assessment of Kinsie’s field reports filed in the asha archives,
Knepper concludes that “it is clear that he was an excellent ethnogra-
pher. . . . Kinsie focused on activities and relationships that comprised the
White slave trade, such as tricks for evading surveillance at the border”
(2012, 13). In an article relaying a detailed account of how the enquiry
came into being, Dame Rachel Crowdy, the head of the Social Section of
the League, was particularly laudatory about how the expert commission
was “lucky enough to get hold of eight or ten very courageous and very re-
sourceful men and women, and for the last three years those people have
been working as part of the underworld” (1927, 157). The League reports
conferred both expert confirmation and empirical validation on the traf-
fic in women as a real and actionable international phenomenon.5

III

Rather than herald their innovation and scientific rigor, I would argue
that the League reports attest to the shared genealogy and porosity
among undercover, state-­sanctioned, and academic modes of knowledge
production, and to how each served to prop up the factual aura of the
others’ truth claims. Instigated, underwritten, and carried out by par-
ticularly interested U.S. agents, the “revolutionary” method of employ-
ing undercover agents could not be applied in the second investigation in
the Far East. As Knepper notes, “Because the traffic in women in Asia in-
volved Asian women, [Johnson] had ‘little use for [a] white investigator’”
(2012, 21–22). Instead, the 1932 Report relied on interviews with govern-
ment officials and testimonies from local voluntary organizations. Thus,
the racially discriminating and geopolitically selective origins of anti-
trafficking in the imperial age were reinscribed in the shift to “interna-
tional co-­operation” built on “expert” and “on-­the-­spot” investigations.
More significant than the method of information acquisition, the two
reports differed in their composition and organization. The 1932 Report
imposed a clear racial demarcation between “Occidental women” and
“Asiatic women.” Indeed, the authors outline two possibilities that had
been considered for the report’s organization. The first option, of “divid-
ing it into chapters according to the territories visited,” would have dem-

Surveillance and Antitrafficking 53

onstrated “the problem under enquiry in the light of the social and eco-
nomic conditions, laws and administrative measures of each territory”
(League of Nations 1932, 18). However, with such an approach, “the actual
stages of international traffic would appear in fragmentary form with
no proper link.” In addition, the nation-­based organization would pro-
duce “a considerable amount of duplication.” The commission ultimately
elected the second approach, of dividing the report into “chapters treat-
ing the problem according to racial groups of victims,” because “this ar-
rangement, which, like the international traffic itself, disregards political
frontiers, would convey to the readers a more living picture of all causes,
methods and consequences of traffic, following it through all stages from
place of origin to the place of destination” (ibid.).
The first section of the 1932 Report, “The Findings of the Inquiry,”
opens with the two racial distinctions clearly denoted in paragraph head-
ings titled “Traffic in Occidental Women in Asia” and, immediately fol-
lowing, “Traffic in Asiatic Women.” Although the authors later note that
“the bulk of the traffic with which this report is concerned is traffic in
Asiatic women from one country of Asia to another,” they first point out
that “there is a certain movement of occidental prostitutes to the Orient,
while hardly any oriental women are known to go for purposes of pros-
titution to the Occident.” The overriding concern with interracial sexual
relations, which is categorized as a matter of “international traffic,” is ex-
pressed and explained in the further subdivision of “occidental women.”
Within the Occidental victims of traffic in Asiatic countries, the most
serious problem and one which is fraught with the danger of further
development concerns Russian women of the refugee class in North-
ern China and Manchuria. It is not in the fully accepted sense of the
word a traffic between Occident and Orient, as the victims either are
residents of China or come from the Asiatic parts of Russian territory.
But even when staged entirely within the borders of China, it clearly
bears the stamp of international traffic. (League of Nations 1932, 21)
Note the slippage between interracial and international. Even as the
rubric of the “international” was marshaled to herald a new, racially neu-
tral concern about the traffic in women and to authorize the League with
an unprecedented supranational political will, this passage demonstrates
a persistent inability to transcend the racialist and racist worldview of
empire. The remarks go on to point out how the demand for Occidental
women was decreasing in Asia, adding that, “provided efforts to check

54 Laura Hyun Yi Kang

traffic [were] maintained, there [would be] no need to fear a revival of
the conditions of twenty or thirty years [before], when considerable num-
bers of Occidental prostitutes, beginning with the countries nearer their
homes, went farther and farther afield in the Orient in the various stages
of their search for new opportunities to exercise their profession” (ibid.).
The assurances against interracial sexual contact is soon reiterated: “Traf-
fic in the East is characterized by the fact that prostitutes going to foreign
countries do so exclusively in search of clients among their own country-
men abroad” (ibid., 22). The summary ends with a paragraph subtitled
“Less Cynicism than in Occident,” which notes that even as the “Asiatic
prostitutes” had to contend with more deplorable working conditions,
“there was a noticeable absence of vulgar appeal to sensuality, such as is
often displayed by occidental prostitutes” (ibid.).
The following substantial section, on “Racial Groups of Victims,” is fur-
ther subdivided into these distinguished groups: “Occidental Women (Ex-
cepting Russians of the Far East) as Victims of the Traffic to the Orient”;
“Russian Women in the Far East as Victims of International Traffic”; “Chi-
nese Victims of International Traffic”; and “Women of Japanese Nation-
ality as Victims of International Traffic.” These sections are followed by
shorter sections on “Filipino Women,” “Annamite Women” (in reference
to women from the Union of Indochina), “Siamese Women,” “Women of
Malay Race,” “Indian Women,” “Persian Women,” “Arab and Other Women
of the Near East,” and, finally, “African Victims of International Traffic in
Asia.” In spite of this vast range of geographical locations and ethnic di-
versity, the 1932 Report expresses the most urgent concern for the plight
of the Russian women refugees as truly “unwilling” victims, forced to en-
gage in prostitution and interracial sexual relations with Chinese men.
Despite the questionable methods, these reports were widely read
and endorsed, fueling further enactments against and surveillance of
women’s cross-­border movements. The antitrafficking efforts also fed,
with mixed results, into calls for the greater involvement of women in
policing and in public patrols. Some women activists publicly objected
to how the expanding reach of the protocols and conventions would de-
limit the mobility of all women (Pliley 2010, 101–2). There have been di-
vergent assessments of the prominence of the traffic in women in the
League of Nation’s activities. Some scholars see it as an achievement and
vindication of the hard-­fought efforts of women’s groups who sent dele-
gates to Geneva to campaign for a range of issues, including an equal-­
rights treaty. To be sure, the multimodal work of antitrafficking created

Surveillance and Antitrafficking 55

an opening for a limited number of women professionals and activists
in this newly emergent international framework of advocacy and gover-
nance. Fröken Forchhammer addressed the topic in the first speech ever
given by a woman to the Assembly of the League. The Social Section of the
League, which was charged with addressing the traffic in women and chil-
dren, was the only section headed by a woman, Dame Rachel Crowdy. The
permanent Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children
included, in addition to Grace Abbott, Paulina Luisi, a physician from
Uruguay, and Princess Bandini of Italy, who also served on the League’s
eight-­member international committee of experts. In 1922 the secretary
general took special note of how the Advisory Committee on the Traf-
fic in Women and Children “contained a larger representation of women
than any other Committee of the League, since the question with which
it dealt required the fullest co-­operation of women.”6 Noting the absence
of the issue in the first draft of the covenant for the League, from Feb-
ruary 1919, Karina Leppanen concludes, “It demonstrates the fact that
feminist interests were highly visible in the League and shows how suc-
cessfully women and feminist organisations lobbied the League from the
start” (2007, 527). Stephanie Limoncelli is more measured, and ultimately
skeptical. Pointing to the initial resistance from the mostly male leader-
ship, she argues that “officials wanted to ensure coordinated policy for
overseeing existing international conventions already signed by member
states, including the 1904 and 1910 accords dealing with the white slavery
traffic” (2010, 73). Limoncelli concludes, “Bureaucratic logic rather than
humanitarian concern seems to have led the League to its anti-­trafficking
work” (ibid., 73–74). I have proposed a third framing of the League’s work
of antitrafficking, one that demonstrates how the coordinated surveil-
lance of women’s sexuality, labor, and migration made international co-
operation thinkable, even as this very effort testified to the intractability
of racialist and racist divisions that precluded its effective enactment.

Notes

1. Levine also points out that there was some variation in how infected women
were treated, including expulsion from areas near military encampments or cutting
off their hair to deter public presence: “In other colonies, the means chosen were
less dramatic and ritualized, but still focused on women’s mobility: the governing
assumption was that knowing women’s whereabouts and having the ability to reg-
ister, detain, or expel them bodily was desirable” (2003, 39).

56 Laura Hyun Yi Kang

 2. “Minutes of the International Congress on the White Slave Traffic Held at
Westminster Palace Hotel on June 21st, 22nd and 23rd 1899,” 4ibs/1/1, Box fl192,
Archives of the International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons,
Women’s Library, London. Quoted in Thomas Richard Davies, “Project on the Evo-
lution of International Non-­Governmental Organizations,” http://www.staff.city
.ac.uk/tom.davies/IBSTP.html, 8 April 2010.
3. The 1921 questionnaire included a supplementary section on “Colonies and
Dependencies,” which expressed a persistent worry about interracial sexual rela-
tions. A parenthetical note in the section pointed out, “Reports have been received
that it is the practice in certain Colonies for immigrant white men to have native
women and girls procured for them for immoral purposes, and that these women
and girls are provided for them by Chiefs or procurers” (League of Nations 1921a,
231).
4. Johnson had previously served as the director of the Sanitary Corps of the
national army, and in 1918 published an essay titled “Eliminating Vice from Camp
Cities” in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
5. This dynamic has extended into contemporary assessments. Citing Judith
Walkowitz’s 1980 argument that “ ‘white slavery’ and ‘child prostitution scandals’
in late nineteenth century Britain ‘had all the symptoms of a cultural paranoia,’”
Barbara Metzger counters the charge with the assertion that “investigations by the
League of Nations later confirmed the existence of trafficking as a long-­standing
phenomenon” (2007, 56).
6. Quoted in Pliley 2010, 96. Pliley further points out that “by 1930 women
represented six out of the fourteen governmental delegates and four of the six
­assessors.”

Surveillance and Antitrafficking 57

 3
LEGALLY SEXED
Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens

L I S A J E A N M O O R E A N D PA I S L E Y C U R R A H

The story of birth certificate corrections begins, for our purposes, in

1965, when a transsexual woman (a woman born male who transitions
to female) asked the City of New York to issue her a new birth certifi-
cate identifying her as female. “Anonymous,” as described in court docu-
ments, did everything she thought was needed to function socially as a
woman: her gender identity was affirmed by a medical professional; she
passed the “real life” test of living as a woman; she underwent sex re-
assignment surgery; she began a lifelong course of feminizing hormones
(Anonymous v. Weiner 1966). But state-­issued identity documents still des-
ignated Anonymous as male. The “M” gender marker, revealing her his-
tory as a transsexual person, opened up the possibility for her identity as
a woman to be challenged, undermining her ability to function legally and
socially as a woman. The director of the Bureau of Records and Statistics
denied her request to have her gender marker changed. The rationale for
the denial in the 1965 report—often cited by policymakers and judicial
authorities—was a need to protect “the public interest . . . against fraud”
(New York Academy of Medicine Committee on Public Health 1966). In
1971 the policy of denying such petitions outright was reformed, to a de-
gree: transsexual men and women born in New York City who could show
they had completed full “convertive surgery” were reissued birth certifi-
cates that eliminated the box for sex entirely (New York City Health Code
1971), thus still effectively outing an individual as “other” and inviting
further opportunities for scrutiny and surveillance.
This story demonstrates the concerns with fraud and the attachment
of physical, anatomical appearance to gender stability, indicating the cul-
tural and political urgency to produce a body that matches a “stable” gen-
der identity. Our analysis of the regulatory changes in the birth certificate
since 1965 reveals the gendered surveillance apparatuses and adminis-
trative systems put in place to ensure that someone is who they say they
are. Birth certificates link the body to the gendered identity of a sexed
individual. In this context, the body is imagined as pristine, biologically
coherent, legible, and untainted by culture; the birth certificate, conven-
tional wisdom suggests, simply records the facts, the baby’s sex being a
permanent and indisputable one. This document, unchanged, is supposed
to accompany an individual for life. We suggest that the amended birth
certificate to change one’s sex and the controversies about this process
are indicative of cultural concerns about the truth and permanence of sex
and gender (Currah and Moore 2009).
Every day it is apparent how surveillance—the tacit or obvious collec-
tion and processing of data about human bodies—has grown in intensity
and precision. Electronic monitors of speed recorded through algorithms
on the New Jersey Turnpike, targeted marketing through the sidebars on
social-­media sites, and the ubiquitous security cameras trained on our
every move track and aggregate our embodied movements through space
and time. As the sociologist David Lyon has written, from modernity on-
ward “the body achieved new prominence as a site of surveillance. Bodies
could be rationally ordered through classification in order to socialize
them within the emerging nation-­state. Bodies were distrusted as sen-
sual, irrational, and thus in need of taming, subject to disciplinary shap-
ing toward new purposes” (2001a, 292). We argue that surveillance is not
universally and uniformly applied to all human bodies and, furthermore,
that monitoring occurs with different degrees of specificity and intention
depending on the presumed coherence of gender and sex (see also Casper
and Moore 2009).
Both scholars and transgender-­rights advocates have pointed to the
many contradictions in state-­formulated constructions of gender. Advo-
cates highlight these contradictions to persuade state agencies to adopt
more consistent or uniform standards. However, among advocates, there
is disagreement about what those gender standards should be. Some ar-

Legally Sexed 59
gue that self-­avowed gender identity should be the only standard in state
recognition of gender or sex (International Bill of Gender Rights 1990;
The Yogyakarta Principles 2007). Others promote standards in which pro-
fessionals make the determination based on particular medicalized met-
rics. Still others argue that since the gender binary reflects hegemonic
and increasingly outmoded gendered social and legal structures, rather
than any fundamental truths of bodies and identities, gender should not
be an element of any official identifying document (Vade 2005). Some
scholars, on the other hand, use the contradictions around state recog-
nition of the legal sex of transgender people to demonstrate the radical
instability of gender (Butler 1993). Regardless of the contradictions, sur-
veillance apparatuses, such as the birth certificate, are indispensable to
our ability to function as sexed and gendered individuals.
It is taken for granted that one needs identity documents in order
to move through the world. As Craig Robertson points out, “In our con-
temporary world, there is a general acceptance that identity can be docu-
mented, that someone can be known and recognized through a document”
(2010, 250). Robertson’s work traces the American passport from its birth
and through its hundred-­year history, and identifies the ways that con-
necting an individual human body with a piece of state-­sanctioned paper
transformed regimes of surveillance. Our work builds on that of Robert-
son through the examination of the birth certificate. In a departure from
much scholarship on identity documents, we argue that gender can never
be disentangled from surveillance. In this essay we make a feminist inter-
vention by examining shifts in the legal, medical, and commonsense
logics governing the designation of sex on birth certificates issued by the
City of New York between 1965 and 2006.1 We explore the different nar-
ratives at work during two moments when transgender-­rights advocates,
medical authorities, and government officials came together to negotiate
legal definitions of sex.
Using participant observation, ethnography, in-­depth interviews, and
content analysis, we examine the negotiation of gender in the process
of trying to obtain state-­issued identity documents. Paisley Currah, co-
author of this essay, served as an “expert advocate” on the Transgender
Law and Policy Institute on the Transgender Advisory Committee (tac),
which met four times between February and April 2012.2 Data for this
essay were collected from Currah’s fieldnotes on earlier meetings and the
official committee meetings, from official meeting minutes of the tac,
from Currah’s autoethnographic account, and from his records on advo-

60 Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah

cacy on this issue in New York City between February 2002 and Decem-
ber 2006. As well, we drew from legal documents, archival research, and
interviews with other advocates: Dean Spade, a lawyer with the Sylvia
Rivera Law Project; Chris Daley, executive director of the Transgender
Law Center; and Mara Keisling, Executive Director of the National Cen-
ter for Transgender Equality.
Before 9/11, transgender people whose gender identity differed from
their legal sex at birth found themselves in a paradoxical situation
whereby, for instance, a person’s legal sex might change simply by cross-
ing a state line, or one’s sex designation on a driver’s license might differ
from that on file with the Social Security Administration (Currah forth-
coming; Greenberg 1999). The modern regulatory project of sex classifi-
cation has been in crisis for decades, caused by increasing divergence be-
tween individual gender definition (or identity) and legal sex designation.
Post-­9/11 the norms for identity documents have been regulated more
stringently. Consequently, mismatching identity documents create sig-
nificant difficulties for transpeople because systems of surveillance are
triggered by mismatching documents. In this era of heightened scrutiny
of individuals’ bodies and histories, transgender people find themselves
under increased surveillance (Currah and Mulqueen 2011). As with other
subaltern groups positioned as not members of the imagined normative
majority—undocumented workers, immigrants, “aliens” (non-­U.S. citi-
zens), and other “suspicious persons”—transgender people are constantly
forced to account for themselves by documenting belonging (S. Ahmed
2000) via identity documents and often also via legitimating letters from
their physicians (National Center for Transgender Equality 2004).

Birth of a Citizen(ry)

Birth certificates establish the earliest relationship between an individual

and the state. The advent of larger, centralized modern state formations
puts greater distances between magistrates and citizens, and thus re-
quires standardized systems for identifying and individuating its popu-
lation (J. C. Scott 1998). Alongside death and marriage certificates, birth
certificates are among the “vital statistics” that states use to count, study,
and manage their populations (Lunde 1975; Shapiro 1950). These docu-
ments are essential for demography—that is, birth rate, mortality rates,
fertility, migration—for municipalities and nation-­states. Birth certifi-
cates aim to make an individual uniquely identifiable, recognizable, and

Legally Sexed 61
classifiable (Rule et al. 1983; Stevens 1999). In attempting to codify the
relationship between an individual and the state, birth certificates con-
stitute one of the technologies of control of modern systems of biopower
(Foucault 1976; Foucault 1978).
Birth certificates provide benefits and confer responsibilities. They cre-
ate recognition for the distribution of rights and resources from the state
to individuals, such as voting, social security, Medicaid, and welfare bene-
fits. Birth certificates are inscribed with cultural norms and values exer-
cised through legally certified social relations that are expressed through
bureaucratically mandated classifications of the parents’ age, marital
status, and racial identification. These categories highlight social desires
for the organization of human populations based on beliefs about sex,
gender, race, and class: binary sexed, biologically driven, heterosexual,
racially homogeneous, married families. For example, “legitimacy” is
the legal certification of the status of offspring born to parents who are
legally married at the time of the infant’s birth.3 Marital status and legiti-
macy on birth certificates are linked to marriage laws, functioning as dis-
ciplinary mechanisms that certify that some births are legitimate while
others are not.
Racial and ethnic categories have gone through many permutations on
the U.S. Census, on marriage licenses, and on birth certificates. Since the
early 2000s, many municipalities used the vital statistics categories rec-
ognized by the National Center for Health Statistics. The ten categories
for race are White, Black, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino,
Other Asian or Pacific Islander, Other Entries, and Not Reported. In 1864
politicians coined the term miscegenation to refer to the illegal mixing of
two or more races as a means to ensure and regulate human reproduction
and racial “purity” (Pascoe 2009, 1). As the feminist historian Peggy Pas-
coe has shown, as late as 1999 antimiscegenation laws included in state
constitutions made marriage illegal between a white person and some-
one with one-­eighth or more “negro blood” (ibid., 307). While antimisce-
genation laws have been eradicated, racial correlates are used to make
arguments about certain types of human births. Case in point: the birth
certificate of the president of the United States, Barack Obama, has been
dissected and inspected from multiple angles to dispute the legitimacy
of his claim to the presidency. Clearly motivated by racist beliefs, the de-
mands of birthers (those who insist on President Obama’s alien status)
have revealed their incredulity and discomfort with the fact that an Afri-
can American man resides in the White House. The birther phenomenon

62 Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah

clearly illustrates that birth certificates are rife with politics. In a broader
epistemological sense, identity documents do not so much confirm iden-
tity as produce and authorize it legally.

Breeding Grounds

In the lexicon of vital statistics discourse, the birth certificate is referred

to as a “breeder document.” That is, it is a primary authenticating identity
paper used when applying for other identity documents (New York City
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene 2005). Birth certificates con-
tain descriptions of the sex and birth history of the infant, both of which
are understood as fixed pieces of data. Unlike aspects of identity that are
recognizably mutable—such as one’s name, appearance, and ability—sex
is assumed to be immutable, like place of birth and biological parentage,
and is a fundamental characteristic for identifying citizens. Documenting
birth through the birth certificate is an attempt to ground with certainty
the material embodiment of the baby’s flesh as a gendered legal entity.
That is, the state can study, track, educate, tax, and distribute resources
to these imagined coherent selves, selves that flow from the entity de-
scribed in biological terms and affirmed in state documentation. This is
also a document that regulates social status, gender roles, and related
performances. The dual function of the birth certificate—as documentary
record of a historical fact and as a primary identity document—reveals
the complex relation between identity documents and shifting identities,
and between biological sex and legal gender identity.
The more the science of sex advances, the less unitary and the more
troubled the notion of sex as a binary concept becomes (Rosario 2002).
For instance, according to Gerard Noriel, in 1829 a French doctor peti-
tioned the state to allow doctors, instead of officials, to determine the sex
of infants, because “the municipal officials were unable to determine the
sex of a child in doubtful cases” (2001, 53). In an article on the issue of
transsexuals and birth certificates, L. O. Schroeder points out, “Legally,
a definition of male or female does not exist. The presumption that gen-
der is so well understood as not to need defining does not survive exami-
nation” (1973, 239). Gender is shaped by the interplay between a num-
ber of distinct and often historically shifting factors—sex chromosomes,
gonadal sex, sex hormone pattern, internal nongonadal sex organs,
genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, gender of rearing, and gender
identity.4 These characteristics are assumed to align themselves into a

Legally Sexed 63
simple, unitary, uncontested form, defined as male or female. However,
even these apparently biological elements are not always in alignment:
people with intersexed conditions are born with different constellations
of sex characteristics; many transgender individuals make surgical inter-
ventions on their bodies or take hormones to alter them. State actors,
then, are forced to choose and monitor a particular criterion for defining
sex when assigning legal gender identity. Compounding the confusion,
in the United States there are state entities with jurisdictional power to
define sex. For example, states, territories, and the federal government
each issue all sorts of identification documents—from passports to birth
certificates to drivers’ licenses to pilots’ licenses to Social Security cards.
Even state entities that do not issue identity documents but do segregate
on the basis of gender make their own rules for gender classification—
prisons, hospitals, schools, drug rehabilitation centers, youth service pro-
viders, social services. To add yet one more layer of complexity, judges
have added to the chaos by finding that one’s legal gender for one social
function may not hold for others (Currah forthcoming).

First Iteration:
Attempts by Transsexuals to “Conceal” Their Sex

The phenomenon of transsexualism was introduced to the U.S. public

with the news coverage surrounding Christine Jorgensen’s transition
in 1951—fourteen years before Anonymous’s 1965 petition5 requesting
the New York City Department of Health (doh) change the gender on
her birth certificate. However, the first known “sex change” involving
genital surgery had taken place twenty years earlier (Meyerowitz 2002,
19). The historian Joanne Meyerowitz recounts in her comprehensive
history of transsexuality in the United States that the doh had previ-
ously granted similar requests for surgery to three others (ibid., 243), but
with Anonymous’s request, the New York City Commissioner of Health,
George James, sought guidance. He formally requested that the New York
Academy of Medicine’s Committee on Public Health “convene a group, in-
cluding neurologists, gynecologists, endocrinologists, and psychiatrists”
to consider the “enormous psychological, legal, and biological implica-
tions” of granting these petitions and to advise the doh on whether or
not it should revise its policy.6 James noted in his letter that, at the time,
nine other birth-­registration areas in the United States had accepted
requests to change the sex on a birth certificate. After three meetings,

64 Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah

some legal research, and the impassioned pleas of the transsexual medi-
cal advocate Harry Benjamin, the committee concluded that it was never-
theless “opposed to a change of sex on birth certificates on transsexual-
ism.” Their report, which was reprinted in the Bulletin of the New York
Academy of Medicine and often cited in legal cases in the ensuing years,
concludes: “The desire of concealment of a change of sex by the trans-
sexual is outweighed by the public interest for protection against fraud”
(New York Academy of Medicine Committee on Public Health 1966, 724).
The official minutes of the meetings illustrate committee members’
concerns about fraud: that one would hold oneself out to be a gender one
was not. One doctor paraphrased the New York Penal Code at the time—
“Nobody is allowed to dress in such a way as to hide his true identity”—
and pointed out that a number of “transvestites” had been jailed for this
reason. Such statutes were ubiquitous at the time (Hunter, Joslin, and
McGowan 2004). The first draft of the committee’s report listed as a pub-
lic interest “the protection of a prospective spouse against fraud.”7 New
birth certificates, a federal official informed the committee, could be used
to get benefits reserved for one gender or to escape obligations for the
other (Council 1965). At the committee’s second meeting, the chairperson
invited an attorney to brief the committee. While the attorney suggested
that a transsexual woman might be able to use an amended birth certifi-
cate in a ceremonial marriage (to a non-­transsexual man, presumably),
he “doubted whether it could be considered a marriage,” because she was
originally a man. The committee considered adoptions as a method by
which to legally recognize the “new sex” of these people—for instance,
adding a codicil to the birth certificate stating, “Now known as female.”
(There was no discussion of the existence of female-­to-­male transsexu-
als.) In the end, however, they decided there was no mechanism “not in-
jurious to the public” that would also “make the transsexual happy,” so
they concluded that “for the protection of the general public, [one’s status
as a transsexual] should be known.” As an illustration of this public inter-
est, one doctor cited the case of “a man who marries one of these persons
with the expectation of having a family.”8
The fear of fraud makes obvious the entrenched belief, held by medical
experts, government officials, and the non-­transsexual public, that one
cannot change one’s sex, only its “outward appearance.” While the birth
sex of infants is almost always assigned based on a visual check of exter-
nal genitalia, the criterion, according to the committee, should be dif-
ferent for those who change their genitals later in life: while “ostensibly

Legally Sexed 65
female,” “male-­to-­female transsexuals are still chromosomally males”
(New York Academy of Medicine 1966). Of course, it is precisely because
some transsexual women and men can pass in their new gender, can be-
come “the other sex,” that authorities believe “the public” must be pro-
tected. Indeed, the public was protected by ensuring that the state would
“out” transsexual people by listing their birth sex on the birth certificate.
The sociologist Erving Goffman describes the presentation of self to
others as having a “promissory character” (1959, 2): “The impressions
that the others give tend to be treated as claims and promises they have
implicitly made, and claims and promises tend to have a moral charac-
ter” (249). Humans, in Goffman’s estimation, present themselves to one
another within a taken-­for-­granted relationship of trust. We are who we
present ourselves to be, with evidence—a biography—to back it up. In
this sense, birth certificates function as a sort of promissory document
not only about an individual’s body, but about the particular history of
that body. What is in fact social gender is assumed to guarantee a corre-
spondence between one’s present body, its past, and the gender presenta-
tion one puts out into the world. The accusation of fraud is made coherent
by the belief that the body cannot become the other “sex” physically, and
therefore any suggestion or performance of the opposite sex/gender is a
lie. The apparently endless articulation of concern about enabling fraud in
the committee minutes—producing what one committee member referred
to as an “illegal document”—reflects anxiety about transsexuals conceal-
ing their “true identity” from the public. The infant’s body as described by
the medical declaration of sex at birth and represented in the birth certifi-
cate stands as a singular, objective, and original truth to be represented
throughout the life-­course. An amended document is therefore not a cor-
rection but a fraudulent document concealing the original truth.

Second Iteration: The No-­Gender Alternative

In 1971, six years after the New York Academy of Medicine presented its
report to the commissioner of health, the New York City policy was re-
formed. Instead of denying the petitions of transsexual men and women,
the city would issue new birth certificates with no sex designation: the
box for sex was eliminated. It was, for its time, one of the more liberal
policies regarding the sex designation of transsexuals in the United
States. To be eligible for this “no gender” certificate, transsexual men and
women had to prove they had undergone “convertive” genital surgery, in-

66 Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah

terpreted by the Department of Vital Statistics as phalloplasty or vagino-
plasty. Petitioners had to supply a physician’s “detailed surgical operative
record” detailing a postoperative exam and a psychiatric exam. The re-
issued certificates included the statement: “This certificate is filed pur-
suant to subsection 5 of subsection (a) of Section 207.05 of the Health
Code of the City of New York.” The certificates had two markers that re-
vealed the individual’s status as transsexual: (1) no box for a gender des-
ignation, omitting a fundamental vital statistic that reviewers of birth
certificates—potential employers, the Social Security Administration,
drivers’ license bureaus, other government agencies, and social-­service
providers—might have looked for, especially when confronted with
someone who was unable to completely pass in their new gender; (2) if
one looked up the particular subsection of the Health Code referred to on
the amended certificates, one would learn that “the name of the person
has been changed pursuant to a court order and proof satisfactory to the
Department has been submitted that such person has undergone conver-
tive surgery” (New York City Health Code 1971). While laypeople might
not have seen these as markers of a transsexual history, those in the busi-
ness of document verification, of re-­cognizing citizens, would have. Ironi-
cally, deleting the gender box made sex more visible through its highly
marked absence.

Third Iteration: Mandating Gender Permanence

By 2002, a new social movement of transgender activists and legal advo-

cates emerged with activist groups, legal services, and community-­based
organizations dedicated to trans issues. Annual conferences, newsletters,
magazines, and the Internet have done much to create and solidify trans
communities in the United States and beyond (Denny 2006). Most gay,
lesbian, and bisexual groups had amended their mission statements to
include transgender people in their constituency. Media representations
of transgender people were beginning to shift from depictions of shock,
revulsion, and horror in films such as the Crying Game to more sympa-
thetic and respectful renderings, such as the films Boys Don’t Cry or Trans-
america. The movement was also becoming institutionalized. Medical pro-
fessionals specializing in transgender health formed an organization to
recommend standards of care. Cases involving transgender issues were
beginning to have positive outcomes in the courts. A handful of states
and dozens of municipalities banned discrimination against transgender

Legally Sexed 67
people, including New York City in 2002 (Transgender Law and Policy
Institute 2007).
In November 2002 a coalition of fourteen organizations “concerned
with the civil rights of transgender New Yorkers” sent a letter to the com-
missioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hy-
giene (dohmh) requesting that the no-­sex birth certificate policy be re-
formed and that the “voices of those individuals and organizations who
are most concerned with this issue” be involved with the policy revision
process.9 Allies for this cause in 2002 included the Center for Constitu-
tional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, national gay organiza-
tions such as Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights,
and local gay and transgender organizations. After two years of prelimi-
nary meetings, in December 2004 the dohmh formed the Transgender
Advisory Committee, which met four times between February and May
2005. Unlike in the committee in 1965, this committee included members
of the transgender community, and all the member medical professionals
had experience in treating transgender people—some were strong allies
to the transgender community.
While the prevailing view during the 1965 negotiations was that trans-
sexual people were gender frauds per se as one could never change one’s
essential sex, during the 2002–2006 gender negotiations, discussions
centered on developing criteria to distinguish those who were tempo-
rarily living in the other gender from those whose transition was “perma-
nent and irreversible” (New York City Department of Health and Mental
Hygiene 2005). The crux of the struggle between transgender advocates
and public officials turned on which criteria would be appropriate indicia
of permanence. Officials initially advocated for particular types of genital
surgery—vaginoplasty for transgender women, phalloplasty for trans-
gender men—as testament to the permanence of a transsexual person’s
gender identity. The requirement for genital surgery would mean most
transgender people would not be eligible for an amended birth certificate.
As well, requiring surgery to validate gender permanence, thus implying
that gender is determined by the body and that surgical body modifica-
tions guarantee permanence, belied current models in both transgender
health care and in transgender communities’ understanding of gender
identity; for the advocates, in line with transgender communities’ views,
gender was determined by one’s gender identity—that is, how an indi-
vidual intrasubjectively and relationally produces their self-­concept of
gender—rather than through physiological interventions. As expressed

68 Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah

in the International Bill of Gender Rights (1990), a foundational docu-
ment for transgender activism in the U.S. before the first meeting of the
Transgender Advisory Committee, transgender community advocates on
the committee strategized ideal and realistic outcomes. Their ideal policy
was to extend the current (1971) policy—no gender marker—to every-
one’s birth certificates, as an initial step to get the state out of the busi-
ness of defining and regulating gender. They decided not to introduce this
idea, however, since it could have been read as naïve, radical, or even unin-
telligible, and risked putting transgender advocates outside the realm of
pragmatic policy reform.10 Moreover, the charge of the committee was to
revise the “change of sex” policy, and the advocates understood that gen-
der would remain in use as a biometric identifier. In addition, at the time,
New York State courts were hearing challenges to the ban on same-­sex
marriage. Officials perhaps understood, though they never stated it out-
right, that the ban on same-­sex marriage depended on the state’s power
to make gender classifications and hence determine who is heterosexual.
From the advocates’ perspective, the next best policy would be to
allow individuals to change their birth certificates by simply informing
the dohmh that their gender had changed and requesting that the new
gender be indicated on their birth certificate. Officials’ preoccupation
with gender permanence, however, made it unlikely that an individual
could change their sex designation without the involvement of special-
ized experts to “attest” to the permanence of the transition. The most
realistic outcome, advocates decided, would be to eliminate the require-
ment for “convertive” surgery and any requirements for body modifica-
tion. Advocates understood, but did not emphasize to officials, that many
transgender health-­care specialists would define, for some individuals,
“appropriate medical treatment” as not including hormones or surgery.
As advocates argued in a memo to the dohmh during initial negotia-
tions over the policy, “Perhaps the single most erroneous misconcep-
tion is that sex reassignment consists of a single ‘sex-­change’ operation’”
(Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2003). Most people who transition do not
undergo either of the genital surgeries required by the 1971 policy. Even
for those who would like to have genital surgery, making it a prerequisite
for a birth-­certificate change imposes a daunting financial burden. Sig-
nificantly, requiring genital surgery before allowing a legal change in sex
on the birth certificate would exclude all but those who wanted and could
afford genital surgery, making sex—for transgender people, at least—a
privileged category legally mediated by one’s class status.

Legally Sexed 69
 The public officials’ anxiety about gender permanence was severe and
clearly outweighed other concerns. The narrative that the body’s ana-
tomical markers (sexed genitals) define, legitimate, and authorize gender
(identity) and make it permanent is crucial to the gender ideological sys-
tem. In this way of thinking, the “common sense” importance of anatomy
is so strongly established that it is immune to arguments that reveal that
the criteria are social and structural. Because anatomical changes are ex-
pensive and also require the cultural capital to navigate a complicated
biomedical-­industrial complex, those who can attain this type of physio-
logical change most often rank higher in systems of social stratification.
The distinction between those who can afford surgery and those who can-
not becomes the arbiter of who can legitimately be a man or a woman: the
difference between a transgender woman who has had surgery and one
who hasn’t is $30,000. Yet the former would have the right “breeder” iden-
tity document as a result of being able to purchase anatomical markers.
The idea that the new requirements should ensure that the gender
change was permanent dominated preliminary meetings of the official
Transgender Advisory Committee. For example, Stephen Schwartz said
the commissioner of health wanted assurances of permanence and that
there would be “no further changes” to the individual. Schwartz stated
he was “concerned about people changing their minds about their tran-
sitions” and asked, “How do we make sure it is really permanent?” The
dohmh bureaucrats summed up their concern in the committee’s first
official meeting: “What is a reasonable minimum standard an individual
should have to meet to make a permanent change in one’s gender?” A
permanent transition, for the officials, was one marked by genital sur-
gery. One urologist pointed out that “on the issue of permanence, it can
only be met if the source of the opposite hormone were removed, with
an orchidectomy or hysterectomy.” Another urologist said that one could
only demonstrate their “commitment to their new gender role” with an
“anatomical change.” Advocates thus began the process of renegotiating
the birth-­certificate policy with two goals: first, that reissued birth cer-
tificates list the reassigned gender; second, that the requirement for “con-
vertive surgery” be eliminated (New York City Department of Health and
Mental Hygiene 2005).
The fundamental strategy of advocates, based on our analysis, was to
“de-­medicalize” the policy, and ironically, rely on the authority of medical
experts to do so. They marshaled transgender health care authorities to
acknowledge the myriad procedures and varying rates of success for sur-

70 Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah

gical operations. At one point, they submitted a memo from a transgender
medical doctor listing 31 surgical procedures to dispel the “one surgery”
myth. Transgender health care advocates on the committee argued re-
peatedly that transgender health care is highly individualized, that there
are many routes to transition, and that a requirement for genital surgery
was “excessive” since the majority of transgender people do not have it
(New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene 2005). The
lone psychiatrist on the committee, for example, argued that the commit-
tee would never be able to agree on “what degree of surgery, hormones,
and/or anatomical changes would serve as a standard.” He stressed that
“gender reassignment is not simply based on anatomical changes, but
how that person views him/herself and asserts him or herself publicly.”
Advocates invoked medical authorities to show that “permanence”
could be attained in social relationships without medical intervention.
They pointed to recent trends in nondiscrimination laws to define gender
as much broader than anatomical sex. In Boston, for example, women’s
facilities, such as bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms, are open to
anyone whose “gender identity publicly and exclusively expressed” was
female, and vice versa for men (Transgender Law and Policy Institute
2007). Schwartz countered that one could not compare standards for ac-
cess to public restrooms with standards for changes to vital records. “It’s a
very big deal to change a fact of birth,” the dohmh’s counsel added (New
York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene 2005). Advocates
also pointed to the New York State policy on changing gender on driver’s
licenses, which requires a statement from the physician, psychologist, or
psychiatrist certifying that “one gender predominates over the other and
the licensee in question is either a male or female.” Schwartz countered
that “predominates [was] not enough,” that he wanted something that
established once and for all a permanent dominant sex: certification that
the change of gender was permanent and irreversible.
With the exception of the two urologists on the committee, whose
medical practices included gender-­reassignment surgeries, all the other
medical people pointed out that “permanence” and “irreversibility” were
concepts that didn’t make sense medically (ibid.). Most types of body
modification can be reversed: individuals can begin a course of feminiz-
ing or masculinizing hormones, stop taking them, and perhaps restart
taking them later. In very rare cases, individuals can have a second set of
gender-­reassignment surgeries.

Legally Sexed 71
Permanence as Security Measure

The officials’ concern with permanence and irreversibility reflected their

perception of the government’s need for identity fixity. At the first meet-
ing of the Transgender Advisory Committee, Schwartz enunciated his
concern that, with regard to transgender individuals’ identity document
changes, “we won’t know who you are.” Changing the designation of sex
could loosen the link between an individual and the administrative iden-
tity document. This bureaucratic fear of “not knowing” a citizen evokes
a central problem of modern statehood, exacerbated in a post-­9/11 era,
but described as early as 1796 by J. G. Fichte in the Science of Rights: “The
chief principle of a well-­regulated police state is this: That each citizen
shall be at all times and places . . . recognized as this or that particular per-
son” (cited in Caplan 2001, 50). The concern about making identity fraud
easier was explicitly connected to fears about security and to the need to
prevent individuals intent on attacking the United States from obtaining
identity documents that would mask their true identity.

Short-­Lived Victory

Eventually, the medical arguments—that the surgery standard was arbi-

trary, an unreliable guarantor of permanence, and did not reflect the cur-
rent state of transgender health care—convinced officials on the commit-
tee to change the criteria. In July 2005 the committee recommended that
the dohmh “recognize . . . [that] medical and mental health providers
most knowledgeable about an individual’s transgender health should
determine whether an individual is living fully in the acquired gender.”
The proposed policy would require affidavits from two medical experts,
one from a U.S.-­based, state-­licensed, board-­certified medical doctor
and one from a mental-­health professional, also licensed in the United
States, attesting to the “intended” permanence of the transition. Overall,
the policy proposal was viewed as a victory by transgender advocates be-
cause it marked a shift from the discursive and legal regime of forty years
before, in which transsexual people were cast inescapably as “frauds,” to
one in which the new gender of individuals could be listed on their birth
certificates, even without surgery.
When Schwartz presented this policy proposal to the Board of Health—
the appointed body that writes the health code for New York City—in
September 2006, members appeared to generally support the measure.

72 Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah

Their questions and comments were innocuous. The chair of the Board
of Health, in fact, suggested that the name-­change requirement was un-
necessary and should be eliminated from the proposal. Schwartz also pro-
posed removing the specific reference to a “change of sex” from the health
code on the proposed form. The new form would read “pursuant to sec-
tion 207.05” only, indicating that the birth certificate had been changed,
but not why. A hearing for public comments was scheduled for October
2006, and a vote would be taken at the December meeting of the Board of
Health. It was, by all accounts, expected to pass.

Aftermath: Public Reaction to a No-­Surgery Standard

Press coverage following the announcement of the proposed policy gen-

erated what could fairly be described as a media firestorm. The New York
Times published a front-­page story titled “New York Plans to Make Gen-
der a Personal Choice” (Cave 2006, A1). Numerous wire services covered
the policy. An editorial titled “Transgender Folly” railed against drop-
ping the surgery standard (Editorial Board of the Jewish Press 2006). An
essay in Slate, “New York City Bungles Transgender Equality,” by Kenji
Yoshino, an oft-­quoted New York University law professor who writes on
gay rights, described the New York Board of Health as “carried away” by
advocates’ arguments and invoked national security as one justification
for rejecting the proposal (Yoshino 2006).
While the public testimony submitted on the proposal contained pre-
dominantly well-­reasoned formal arguments from public-­interest groups,
elected officials, and lgbt institutions in favor of the changes, media
coverage generated less formal emails to the Board of Health that were
vociferously against it. “Are you people out of your minds????” asked one
member of the public. “How enlightened is a person that refuses to accept
that there is a biological difference between a man and a woman? If I wish
to call myself a dog, I suppose you people would allow that too?” Another
wrote, “I am befuddled and wonder if the inmates are now running the
asylum. How might it be possible for someone with male genitals to now
be listed as being female? Is everyone expected to be blind? I can under-
stand if one had a sex change but simply dressing [in] the clothing of the
opposite sex does not qualify a person of that sex. . . . Transgender does
not mean transsexual in my book” (New York City Board of Health 2006).
Three months after the policy was formally presented, the dohmh
summarily withdrew most of the changes from consideration. Instead,

Legally Sexed 73
the only change to the 1971 policy would be to indicate the reassigned gen-
der of the applicants on reissued birth certificates. The requirement for
convertive surgery remained. dohmh officials cited two main concerns:
first, the policy’s impact on sex-­segregated institutions such as schools,
workplaces, hospitals, and prisons; second, the impact of post-­9/11 fed-
eral legislation concerning identity documents. The United States Con-
gress had recognized the importance of birth certificates in the “Intel-
ligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. . . . We [dohmh
officials] anticipate that automated verification of birth certificate data
by federal agencies and state motor vehicle agencies will be a central com-
ponent of the regulations. . . . Given the anticipated federal regulations
and the importance of sex as a key element of identity, it is important to
wait for their promulgation” (New York City Department of Health and
Mental Hygiene 2006b). Advocates were not privy to the internal dohmh
discussions that led to the withdrawal of the policy. However, both jus-
tifications seemed weak. For instance, New York State’s drivers’ license
policy was already significantly looser in that it required a letter from a
health-­care provider, so under the 1971 (and now current) policy, trans-
gendered New Yorkers born in the City would be likely to have a different
gender listed on their birth certificate than on their driver’s license.

Legally Sexed

Using the surveillance mechanisms of identity documents, the state im-

plies that it must protect its citizens from would-­be imposters. As “sex
change” was made possible and acknowledged by the general population
as well as policymakers, medical professionals, and bureaucrats, the state
wanted to create a metric that ensured that the identity, once changed,
would not change again. While cultural representations might allow for
the flexibility of gender displays beyond traditional ideological binaries,
state actors, often in the service of their constituents, have difficulty ac-
commodating subjects whose gender identity does not “match” their legal
sex. Even though, in the most recent period, state officials did acknowl-
edge the possibility of identity changing and the necessity of individuals
having identity documents that match, they fought to ensure that this
change of sex be one-­time, enduring, measurable, and “irreversible.” This
anxiety about the possible inability of an identity document to maintain a
correspondence with an individual throughout their life-­span is summed
up by a leading bureaucrat on the issue: “But we won’t know who you are.”

74 Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah

In the end, the barrier put in place in New York City to ensure perma-
nence—requiring genital surgery before an M or an F will appear on the
reissued document—cannot in fact guarantee the permanence of gender
identity or the genitals. While it is unlikely, it is possible for an individual
to have gender-­reassignment surgery more than once. This policy does
not prevent that from occurring, nor does it mandate that individuals
born in New York City who have undergone genital sex-­reassignment sur-
gery change their identity documents to match their new body. It does,
however, prevent the vast majority of individuals whose gender identity
does not match their legal sex from having their gender recognized by the
state. At the time of this writing, the Transgender Legal Defense and Edu-
cation Fund has filed a lawsuit challenging the birth-­certificate policy as
“arbitrary” and “capricious.” Other groups are working to have city legis-
lators pass legislation to mandate criteria for sex reclassification that
does not require body modification.
Whether it is the fraud iteration of the 1960s or the current policy,
state officials are left upholding a standard that is only possible within
a legal framework—that the “essential” nature of identity must be
grounded in the body itself. Within the legal framework, the only way to
change one’s legal sex is to change the body, specifically the genitals. Out-
side the legal framework, advocates, gender theorists, and transgender
people certainly understand the mutability of sex and gender. While
these documents may seem benign, they create pain and suffering at local
levels (Cover 1986; J. C. Scott 1998). Gendered surveillance accomplished
through birth certificates (and all identity documents that rely on this
original paper) means that bodies must reinforce the socially and cultur-
ally mandated binary sex characteristics.

Notes

1. When discussing legal designation as male or female, we use the word sex.
When discussing other classifications, we use gender. We understand sex to be sub-
sumed under gender. Transgender is used to describe those whose gender identity
or gender expression does not conform to social expectations for their birth sex.
2. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (dohmh) con-
vened “an expert Transgender Advisory Committee” in January 2005. The com-
mittee’s task was to “advise the Department and make recommendations on up-
dated policies and procedures. The group was composed of dohmh staff from Vital
Records, Vital Statistics, and the General Counsel’s office, plus eight outside mem-
bers representing transgender expertise in medical, surgical, mental health, legal

Legally Sexed 75
and academic fields” (New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
2005).
3. Nonmarital birth rates by race and of Hispanic origin generally changed little
between 2007 and 2008. The rate for non-­Hispanic white women (33.7 per 1,000)
rose 1 percent, and the rate for black women (72.5) was essentially unchanged. The
rate for Hispanic women declined 3 percent, to 105.1. The rate for api (Asian or
Pacific Islander) women was 28.2 per 1,000. Trends by maternal age since 2002 were
similar across population groups (National Vital Statistics Report 2010).
4. See Greenberg 1999; Haraway 1989; Lorber 1993; Lucal 1999; Oudshoorn 1994;
West and Zimmerman 1987.
5. This was the fifth petition made to the New York City Department of Health.
6. Letter from George James, Commissioner of Health, the City of New York De-
partment of Health to Dr. Harry Kruse, Executive Secretary, Committee on Public
Health, New York Academy of Medicine, April 2, 1965, p. 2.
7. H. D. Kruse, MD, Executive Secretary, Committee on Public Health, New York
Academy of Medicine to Subcommittee on Change of Sex on Birth Certificates for
Transsexuals.
8. Subcommittee on Birth Certificates, New York Academy of Medicine, minutes
of the meeting of June 14, 1965.
9. Letter to Dr. Weisfuse, City of New York Department of Health, November
18, 2002.
10. Paisley Currah’s field notes, 2006.

76 Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah

 PART II

THE VISUAL AND SURVEILLANCE

Bodies on Display
 4
VIOLATING IN/VISIBILITIES
Honor Killings and Interlocking Surveillance(s)

YA S M I N J I WA N I

In 2009 the bodies of four women were discovered in a submerged ve-

hicle in a section of the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ontario. Three of the
women were daughters of Mohammad Shafia, while the other, Rona Amir,
was his first wife. In January 2012 Mohammad Shafia, his second wife,
Tooba, and his son, Hamed, were convicted for the murders of the three
young women—Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti Shafia (ages nineteen, seven-
teen, and thirteen, respectively)—as well as of Rona Amir (age fifty-­two).
Evidence indicated that all four women had been murdered prior to their
submersion. The Crown (representing the State) argued that the mur-
ders were honor killings, a view buttressed by evidence from Mohammad
Shafia, who, in wiretapped conversations with Tooba, had exclaimed that
his daughters had “betrayed humankind, they betrayed Islam, they be-
trayed our religion and creed, they betrayed our tradition, they betrayed
everything” (Appleby 2001a, A5), including his honor. The Crown’s asser-
tion was countered by the Afghan embassy’s statement that honor kill-
ings are not a part of Afghan cultural traditions.1 Despite this denial, the
media continually framed the crime as an honor killing, sometimes sur-
rounding the term with quotation marks as if to separate it out from the
continuum of gendered violence that prevails in all countries. Media ac-
counts repeatedly mentioned the immigrant origins of the family, their
Afghan cultural background, and their migration to several countries be-
fore settling in Canada. In contrast to the usual attention devoted to cases
of femicide or filicide resulting from intimate partner violence, the media
attention to this case signaled it as exemplary of the importation of the
backward and barbaric practices of Muslim immigrants.
In this essay I argue that the media works as a surveillance system,
identifying which bodies are worthy of attention and, in that process,
highlighting cases that mark particular bodies and specific groups as
unworthy of belonging to the nation, or as worthy victims who need to
be saved from their own communities. In this sense, while surveillance
studies as a field has often focused on the construction of risk as em-
bodied by particular groups of men—as, for example, in the case of ter-
rorists and illegal migrants—a feminist analysis suggests that a simi-
lar surveilling practice operates when it comes to women within these
targeted and stigmatized groups. In the Shafia case, I contend, the ex-
tensive media coverage legitimized the surveillance of Muslim women
under the pretext of protecting them from the presumed barbaric prac-
tices ascribed to Islam and the ultrapatriarchal proclivities of Muslim
men, and in placing them under surveillance in these ways, resulted in
the intensified policing of Muslim communities. The mediated emphasis
on “honor killing” as a particularly exotic variant of femicide contributed
to the hypervisibility of the Shafia case against the unstated and muted
backdrop of the everyday gendered violence that women experience, or of
the prevalent femicide of specific groups of women, including aboriginal
women (Jiwani and Young 2006; Jiwani 2009). Rendering the Shafia mur-
ders as honor killings became a cipher for all the ideological baggage that
is invoked in relation to Islam and Muslims, and it served as an ideologi-
cal tool to further profile Muslim men as potential abusers and Muslim
women as at heightened risk.

Mediating Femicide: Hypervisibility and Surveillance

Surveillance depends on regimes of visibility and invisibility (see Smith,

this volume), making visible the potential threats that exist and using
cues to profile potential threats. The mass media constitute a primary ve-
hicle for making visible that which is regarded as a potential threat or for
using the threat as an exemplar to discipline, regulate, and control those
who are perceived as threatening the social, cultural, and political order.

80 Yasmin Jiwani
 On average, approximately 58 women are killed by their partners per
year in Canada (Statistics Canada 2011). This equals approximately one
femicide a week. Yet, while some of these murders are covered in local
newspapers, they rarely achieve the intensity and extent of coverage de-
voted to the Shafia murders. In a recent study Dana M. Olwan (2013) re-
ported that her search of the Canadian newsstand database that covers
all Canadian media resulted in over 1,300 articles that dealt with the Sha-
fia case. My search of femicide cases, over a six-­and-­a-­half-­year period
(2005–2012), using the same database and focusing on one of the major
Canadian national dailies, the Globe and Mail, turned up only 54 stories
on femicides. My search terms included “murder and (women or woman)
and (domestic violence).” In contrast, a search using the term “Shafia”
over the same period of time netted 66 stories, of which 60 were specifi-
cally concerned with the trial coverage. Femicides tend to be invisibilized
or accorded limited coverage, unless, of course, they involve long, sen-
sational trials that focus on crimes regarded as alien to normative stan-
dards. Honor killing, as a category, fits that criterion, as do other aspects
of the ten-­week-­long Shafia trial, which involved 58 witnesses and 162
exhibits.2 My analysis is based on a close textual examination of the trial
coverage as it was reported in the Globe and Mail, and is supplemented
with insights gained from an examination of other media reports.
Existing studies document the low coverage accorded to accounts of
domestic and sexual violence (Benedict 1992; Meyers, 1997), except in in-
stances which involve murder or high-­profile personalities. But even in
these cases, much depends on the status and race of the victim (Dowler,
Fleming, and Muzzatti 2006). As Carol A. Stabile (2006) demonstrates
in her historical analysis of raced and gendered crimes, black victims sel-
dom get the kind and extent of coverage that their white counterparts
do. This finding is corroborated by Travis L. Dixon and Daniel Linz (2000)
in their analysis of race and crime in television news. In the Canadian
context, Scott Wortley (2002) notes the under-­coverage of black female
victims of violence, while Warren Goulding (2001) and Kristen Gilchrist
(2010) demonstrate the lack of media attention given to aboriginal vic-
tims of gendered violence as compared to white victims of gendered vio-
lence. The panoptic power of mainstream media is critical in terms of not
only defining what constitutes a crime, but, importantly, identifying vic-
tims deserving of societal attention and intervention. With the intensity
of attention accorded to the Shafia case, clearly both the victims and per-
petrators, though not white, were propelled into the limelight.

Violating In/Visibilities 81
Panopticons and Synopticons

Within surveillance studies, Foucault’s conceptualization of panopticism

remains a central framework of analysis for scholars. While there has
been much criticism of the overextension of this “paradigm” (see Hag-
gerty 2006), my use of the concept of panopticism concerns the “circuits
of communication” (Foucault 1995, 217) and their cumulative knowledge,
which serves as a benchmark for how one “knows” the world and others
within it. According to Foucault, panopticism is, “a functional mechanism
that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid,
more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come” (ibid.,
209). This power is evident in contemporary society with its pervasive
mechanisms of surveillance ranging from identity cards and passports at
borders to the security and traffic cameras populating urban landscapes
(see Lyon 2006). It was these kinds of surveillance mechanisms that al-
lowed the authorities to apprehend and arrest the Shafias and to deci-
pher how the victims were murdered. Soon after the family reported that
the women were missing, the police installed devices in the Shafia’s ve-
hicle, which allowed them to wiretap the private conversations between
Mohammad and Tooba Yahya; cell-­phone towers were used to locate
Hamed Shafia’s whereabouts on the night of the murders; and his laptop
was examined for incriminating evidence. Similarly, forensic technology
established that the women had been drowned, but it was unclear how
or where. But it was the panoptic power of the mass media—especially
the mainstream and commercial media that captured the murders—that
marked the murders as an exceptional case signifying an impending Mus-
lim threat.
The sheer amount of coverage of the Shafia trial through numerous
media platforms ensured that it became instantaneously available to all.
Individuals loaded videos of the murder scene, courthouse, and commen-
taries on honor killings onto social-­media platforms such as YouTube.
These sites constitute what Thomas Mathiesen (2011) has called synopti-
cons—allowing the many to see the few. In other words, the synopti-
con inverts the relation of the gaze inherent to the panopticon, result-
ing in what Mathiesen calls a “viewer society,” wherein the acts of seeing
and being seen, surveilling and being surveilled are coupled. Through the
mass media, viewers are able to perceive actors across the social spec-
trum. In this case, the media coverage allowed Canadian audiences to
view the Shafia trial, hear and read the witness testimonies, see the per-

82 Yasmin Jiwani
petrators, and know the victims. As one columnist opined, “We’ve come
to know such intimate and tender things about these girls and women,
their belly button studs, their purple nail polish, the lushly romantic texts
their forbidden boyfriends sent. . . . So-­called honor killings are a crime
against nature, against humanity, against family love and, above all else,
against females” (Timson 2011, L3).
The continual focus on the Shafia case—both in print and electronic
media—suggests that it operated within a field of visibility that pro-
moted an actuarial gaze. Allen Feldman defines the actuarial gaze as
the “visual organization and institutionalization of threat perception
and prophylaxis, which cross cuts politics, public health, safety, polic-
ing, urban planning and media practice” (2005, 214). He contends that
through the scopic regimes of the media, the carceral lattice enmeshing
different subject populations is recrafted and visualized in a manner that
“screens, repeats, and screens off shock and trauma” (ibid., 212–13). Ac-
cording to Feldman, issues of visibility and invisibility are structured into
the actuarial gaze.
As much as it exposes and classifies, [the actuarial gaze] also creates
zones of visual editing, structural invisibility, and cordon sanitaire, re-
sulting in the decreasing capacity of surveilled, stigmatized and vul-
nerable groups, classified as risk-­bearers, to make visible their social
suffering, shrinking life-­chances and human rights claims in the global
public sphere. To the very degree that the traumatic realism of the
state and media monopolizes truth-­claiming about hazard, threat and
violence over and against the everyday life experience of populations
and spaces objectified as affected and infected by risk, human rights
violations are rendered invisible or marginal. (Ibid., 213)
While Feldman describes the actuarial gaze in reference to the repeated
and continuous circulation of images from the collapsing Twin Towers
on September 11 to the widespread propagation of the tortured victims
at Abu Ghraib, his analysis is also applicable to the gendering of surveil-
lance. Using “shock and awe” tactics, the actuarial gaze makes visible vio-
lations of the moral order, acts of criminality, and other transgressions,
but it erases from the public eye everyday violations of human rights,
human suffering, and structured inequalities. In the Shafia case, the
young women and Rona Amir (Mohammad Shafia’s first wife) had, on
numerous occasions, sought help. The young women had called on the
authorities at school, and one of them had even sought refuge in a shel-

Violating In/Visibilities 83
ter for a time so as to escape the abuse. Similarly, Rona Amir had con-
tinuously asked for help from a woman she knew in the United States,
but nothing came of it (Appleby 2011b, A10). These instances of violence
were rendered invisible in terms of media attention at the time they oc-
curred. They didn’t surface until the court trial, at which point they be-
came fodder feeding into the stereotypical construction of the Muslim
patriarch as an angry, oppressive tyrant.

Thresholds of In/Visibility: The Somatechnics of Difference

In the post-­9/11 context the Muslim body became signified as the bearer of
risk, carrying within it the threat of destruction—either through stealth
weapons technologies, through the infiltration of Shariah laws, or through
the presumed fecundity of Muslim women whose offspring threaten to
invade the Western nation-­state (Grewal 2003; Werbner 2007). Indeed,
the furor and moral panic over the issue of Muslim women wearing the
hijab and niqab in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia signify
the condensed anxieties and fears about the possible invasion of Islam in
the West, its incursion into and infiltration of the body politic, as well as
its potential to engulf Western culture(s) (Razack 2008; J. W. Scott 2007;
Zine 2009). Jasmin Zine (2009) effectively demonstrates how the tropes
of “disciplining culture,” “death by culture,” and “death of culture” play into
the coverage that Muslims, and especially Muslim women, receive in the
dominant Western press. Each of these tropes relies on the disciplinary
and surveilling power of the state, which identifies the specific cultures
that are to be disciplined (through technologies of racial profiling for in-
stance). The “death by culture” trope focuses on Muslim women’s apparent
vulnerability to the perceived violence of their cultures. Honor killings be-
come a signifier of that particularity of violence seen as endemic to Islam.
This again, through media coverage, provides a rationale for disciplining
particular cultural groups. Finally, the trope of “death by culture” sum-
mons forth fears of invasion, of a nation being engulfed by recalcitrant
minorities with deviant cultural and religious practices. All of this rests on
the corporeality of the body—that which signals its difference.
In the Shafia trial coverage, these tropes were evident in the manner
in which the press reports described both the victims and the perpetra-
tors of the murders. For instance, the young women victims were con-
sistently described as normal teenagers caught in a culture conflict with
their ultrapatriarchal father and their Afghan Muslim upbringing. Their

84 Yasmin Jiwani
aspirations to conform to dominant norms through the wearing of West-
ern clothes and through heterosexual relations outside the familial con-
text were consistently highlighted (Jiwani 2014). Thus, they were por-
trayed as victims of “death by culture”—implying that it was the cultural
tradition of honor, as invested in them, that caused their death. The re-
peated circulation of these young women’s photographs and “selfies”
(self-­photographs) in various poses, mostly in Western dress, made them
seem more “like us” and hence elicited considerable sympathy from the
audience.
At the same time, the reporting, through the panopticism of the
media, served as a disciplining tool; it communicated to Afghan Cana-
dian communities, as well as to other Muslims, that their communi-
ties were under surveillance and that femicides were not permitted in
Canada. However, rather than this being a general condemnation of all
kinds of femicides within any and all communities, it was the specificity
of honor killings as associated with Muslim culture and Afghan traditions
that were castigated as “un-­Canadian” and therefore uncivilized. As the
Ontario Superior Court judge Robert Maranger stated in his judgment,
which was widely reported in the press: “It is difficult to conceive of a
more despicable, more heinous crime. . . . [T]he apparent reason behind
these cold-­blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely inno-
cent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honor . . . that
has absolutely no place in any civilized society” (Bascaramurty and Freeze
2012, A1). The lead prosecutor, Gerard Laarhuis, in his statement to the
media declared, “This verdict sends a very clear message about our Cana-
dian values and the core principles in a free and democratic society that all
Canadians enjoy and even visitors to Canada enjoy” (Appleby 2012, A6).
The civilizational discourse is apparent in these quotes, as is the binary
of Canada as progressive, egalitarian, and free of gender-­based violence,
in contrast to Afghanistan or other Muslim majority countries, which are
cast as “uncivilized” and gender oppressive. But here again, femicide was
not regarded as the root issue; the media instead constructed the Shafia
murders as another sign of the importation of Islam with its presumed
barbaric practices, a sign that represented a threat to an imagined com-
munity of white Canadian bodies.
We continually see commercial media and state attempts to distin-
guish between different kinds of violence against women through the
representation of the Shafia murders as “honor killings.” As the feminist
theorist Sherene Razack aptly notes,

Violating In/Visibilities 85
 A crime of honor is a crime originating in culture/race, whereas a crime
of passion originates in gender (abstracted from all other consider-
ations). A crime of honor thus involves body, emerging as it does as a
cultural tradition, and a crime of gender is mind, a distinctly individu-
alized practice born of deviancy and criminality. The honor/passion
distinction not only obscures the cultural and community approval
so many crimes against women have in majority culture, but it reifies
Muslims as stuck in premodernity while Westerners have progressed
as fully rational subjects with the capacity to choose moral actions,
even if the choice is a bad one. (2008, 128)
Razack’s insightful analysis demonstrates how cultural differences are
freighted with the burden of gendered violence, absenting the respon-
sibility for such violence and failing to note the prevalence of patriarchy
in all societies. What makes the elision possible is the strategic use of
cultural signifiers to demarcate and stigmatize particular groups or com-
munities.
Signifiers attached to the bodies of those who are considered different
are often used to mark cultural deviance. Joseph Pugliese refers to such
culturally coded signifiers as somatechnics, which he defines as “the indis-
sociable way in which the body of a subject is always already technologised
and mediated by cultural inscriptions. In the West, this somatechnolo-
gisation of unassimilable culturalist difference can be seen to be opera-
tive across the broad spectrum of cultural artefacts inscribed by the sign
‘Islam,’ including the black beard, the hijab, the headscarf and the niqab”
(2009, 13). The notion of somatechnics as techne related to the body re-
turns our analytical focus back to the corporeal body “in which the body,
the social-­economic-­political conditions of embodied subjectivity, and
the relationship between the body and the body politic are taken as im-
portant sites of political struggles” (Salter 2006, 178). Here, corporeality is
the site where relations of power are played out. Bodies that are absented
from political considerations—from the field of power, as it were—are
bodies whose corporeal presence is denuded of significance. These are
the bodies that don’t count in Judith Butler’s (2004) terms, precarious
bodies, bodies that are ungrievable. Precarious lives are often relegated
to the zone of structured invisibility within the actuarial gaze. They only
enter the realm of the panopticon or the synopticon when their visibility
becomes corporeally coupled with threat; surveillance then becomes the
technology by which such bodies are made visible, with that visibility

86 Yasmin Jiwani
intimately tied to ways that these bodies are made vulnerable to state
violence. Razack captures this connection elegantly when she writes, “The
eviction of groups of people from political community begins with their
difference, coded as an incomplete modernity that poses a threat to the
nation” (2008, 84). That “incomplete modernity” comes through the sur-
veillance of particular racialized and gendered communities. For example,
this phenomenon occurs in the disproportionate media surveillance of
Afghan communities in Canada—followed by allegations in press reports
of Afghans as tribalistic, primitive, and atavistic. In the aftermath of the
tragic events of September 11, the popular columnist Margaret Wente,
for instance, described Afghans in the following way: “Those who are re-
sponsible are most likely men from remote desert lands. Men from an-
cient tribal cultures built on blood and revenge. Men whose unshakable
beliefs and implacable hatreds go back many centuries farther than the
United States and its young ideas of democracy, pluralism, and freedom”
(2001, A1). Here, orientalism becomes the lens motivating the placement
of these bodies under surveillance as well as the theory rendering them
intelligible through the mass media. Edward Said (1978) identifies four
dogmas of orientalism, of which the fourth one is particularly relevant in
this context: “that the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared
(the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be con-
trolled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation
whenever possible)” (1978, 300–301). Orientalism has legitimized, and
continues to legitimize, violent surveillance technologies and practices
aimed particularly at Muslims and others from the Middle East (Jiwani
2011; Magnet 2012; Razack 2008). In the trial reporting examined, the
Muslim affiliation of the perpetrators was clearly identified through ref-
erences to prayers, Afghanistan, and polygamy, whereas the victims were
consistently portrayed as rebelling against this imposed identity and so-
cial requirements.
The trial press accounts also clearly identify the somatechnics of the
perpetrators in ways that discursively demarcated them as different from
the norm. Tooba Yahya Mohammad, for instance, was described in one
account as “slight and pale, wearing a modest black tunic top over match-
ing pants, cuffed at the wrist and ankle, her small chin quivered now and
then, but she held it together—she is an Afghan, after all, tough and
proud—until, as part of a court procedure, the prosecutor read aloud the
names of her four surviving children” (Blatchford 2009, A2). As evident in

Violating In/Visibilities 87
this quote, the somatechnology that Pugliese describes in terms of iden-
tifiable cultural artifacts, such as a hijab, were conspicuously absent. In-
stead, the somatechne used to demarcate difference is stereotypical at-
tributes of Afghan culture—Afghans as “tough and proud,” reminding
the reader of a famous orientalist poem by Kipling, “The Young British
Soldier.”3 Nonetheless, there were photographs displayed in court that
showed the young Shafia women wearing hijabs, demonstrating that
somatechnes worked to position these young victims as simultaneously
at risk of patriarchal Islam while remaining emblematic signifiers of the
oppressiveness of Islam.
Pugliese further posits that the somatechnics of difference, where dif-
ference is signified as being unassimilable and as culturally foreign, result
in a “prostheticized citizen subject” (2009, 21). The nonwhite body can
never enjoy full or authentic citizenship; rather, it remains an other—
conditionally tolerated, but never part of the body politic. Prosthetic citi-
zenship can be taken away or withheld. It is never permanent. Whiteness
as a racialized technology of power determines who can be granted citi-
zenship and, with it, the security of belonging to the nation-­state and of
having rights that are recognized as rights and upheld within that body
politic. The criteria by which specific bodies are seen as legitimate citizens
as opposed to others who are denied such recognition rests on the race
line (to use a term from Dubois about the ways in which U.S. culture is
organized around a color line—that is, that white supremacy structures
the U.S. polity according to race [1965/1999]).
Mohammad Shafia, his second wife, Tooba Yahya, and his son, Hamed,
remain prosthetic citizens. One way in which the media ensured this
status was through the constant reference to their immigrant status and
origins. Indeed, a key point held against Mohammad Shafia was that he
had immigrated into the country on the basis of his capital and invest-
ment in property. He had “bought his residency in Canada under the fed-
eral investor-­immigrant program” (Appleby 2012, A6). As prostheticized
citizens, then, their murders are located outside the realm of the norma-
tive—this, despite the reality that in the year preceding this quadruple
murder, forty-­five women were killed in Canada as a result of domestic
violence (Statistics Canada 2011). Seen as others, the murderers’ “fit”
within Canada as a sovereign state is questioned. They mark the border
between “us” and “them.” Shades of Afghanistan, with its “primitive, tribal
culture,” are invoked in this coverage, clearly demarcating the boundaries

88 Yasmin Jiwani
between nations, cultures, and religions. It is, as Pugliese (2009) would
suggest, a case of compulsory ­visibility.

The Aftermath

Rachel L. Finn’s (2011) study of surveillant staring (being stared at) ex-
perienced by South Asian women in the United States emphasizes the
corporeal aspects of being subjected to the daily “citizen-­to-­citizen sur-
veillance” that has resulted from the heightened focus on security issues
post-­9/11. Drawing from Sara Ahmed, Finn argues that the signifiers of
cultural differences and their embodiment in “strangers”—discursively
defined as inassimilable others—serve to demarcate racialized bound-
aries and homogenize differences within those regarded as strangers. She
notes, “Surveillance is an active social process that reinforces the differen-
tial structural positioning of its targets” (2011, 424). In a sense, this kind
of surveillance demonstrates the synoptic influence of the mass media.
Convinced about what terrorists “look like” based on images and mes-
sages from the media, citizens then take it on themselves, with permis-
sion and encouragement from state authorities, to spy on others. Yet it is
Finn’s argument about how the bodies of others become defined as racial-
ized boundaries that is of interest here, for if bodies signify borders, then
the threat of difference as an invasive force becomes that much more
potent. Conversely, if bodies are seen as borders to be invaded, rather
than as a threat, then these bodies signify borders that can be overcome,
transcended with the might of state power.
In the Shafia case, both during the trial and after the verdict had been
announced, the Canadian government granted $2.8 million to antivio-
lence organizations to help them sensitize service providers to signs of
potential honor killings (Olwan 2013). In Montreal the Shield of Athena,
an organization that provides multilingual services to victims of domes-
tic violence was granted a hefty $350,000 to aid victims of honor crimes
(Radio Canada 2012). Cultural sensitization becomes one way in which
the state, through nonprofit organizations, carries out its surveillance of
particular bodies. In contrast, as Olwan (2013) contends, organizations
such as the aboriginal women’s organization Sisters of Spirit, along with
many other aboriginal groups, were deprived of much-­needed funding.
These then represent the bodies that can be invaded or overcome and
bodies that are precarious—that is, bodies that simply don’t count.

Violating In/Visibilities 89
 The notion of different bodies as constitutive of a boundary separat-
ing “us” from “them”—the watchers from the watched—offers a way to
reconceptualize security and surveillance. In the first sense, it brings
home the notion of the marked body as a threat where the threat is no
longer abstract but corporealized, where surveillance becomes, as Finn
remarks, “democratized,” making it a duty for all good citizens to main-
tain heightened vigilance to signs of deviant differences. Recasting the
body as border makes apparent the spatial relations of power; thus, the
visibility of the marked body operates against the invisibility of the un-
marked body, which is the body in dominance (e.g., whiteness against
blackness). Here, as Rachel Hall also argues in her contribution to this
volume, the white body is normalized and acts as the standard against
which the racialized body is compared, and against which its differences
are accentuated and signified within particular frames of meaning. John
Gabriel (1998) refers to this as the power of exnomination, where the
nominated body is the profiled body, or as Hall suggests (this volume),
the profiled body is opaque, impenetrable, and therefore always suspect.
The nominated body thus represents the borders of the social order, and
interactions with such a body come to represent transgressions which
may be seen as impure and dangerous. Hence, the Muslim bodies that
committed the “honor killing” come to be framed in the same manner—
as polluting agents who threaten to destabilize the social order by en-
gaging in a heinous crime. That crime, through nomination, is defined
as “honor killing” and thereby abstracted from the more widespread and
prevalent pattern of femicides.
Women, as Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-­Davis (1992) have under-
scored, are boundary markers in most ethnic groups. As women are re-
producers of the nation, their role in upholding the moral order is a neces-
sary foundation for the continuity of patriarchal power. However, where
such patriarchal power has been defined as illegitimate and unacceptable
(as in the case of Muslim men who are perceived as ultrapatriarchal), the
potential exercise of such power is immediately put under surveillance.
Witness, for instance, the state-­mandated publications and workshops
geared toward immigrant Muslim families in Europe. The stated aim
of these is to inculcate in Muslim immigrants and refugees the proper
norms regarding gender relations and sexual rights. The assumption that
citizens at large customarily practice such egalitarian relations and equi-
table rights is simply taken for granted and rarely interrogated (Olwan
2013; Razack 2004). Shoshana Amielle Magnet (2011) discusses how the

90 Yasmin Jiwani
border becomes outsourced, inscribed on bodies that are different and
that reside elsewhere. Surveillance thus occurs outside the nation in
order to preempt any threat from entering the nation. She argues that
this strategy of outsourcing relies on racialized, gendered, and hetero-
normative logics. This is one form of “outsourcing the border,” as Magnet
(2012) would describe it. The state-­imposed criteria as to who can enter
the borders of the nation state are installed in source countries to deter
those who cannot or will not “fit” into the country of destination. The out-
sourcing of surveillance then works in conjunction with the in-­sourcing
of surveillance—through the provision of services and the sensitization
of service providers who work with victims of honor killing. This, I would
suggest, is surveillance with a small “s,” in contrast to Surveillance, which
deploys state technologies to actively and overtly spy, contain, and disci-
pline others (e.g., passport control).

Conclusion

Compared to the long-­standing invisibility of gendered violence com-

mitted on the bodies of sex workers, transsexuals, and indigenous women,
the violence of the Shafia murders hit the screen, shocking and awing
audiences into a heightened awareness of the phenomena of honor kill-
ings. This particularly exotic variant of femicide assumed media currency
for several identifiable reasons: it involved an Afghan family (with all the
connotations of tribal and atavistic Afghan culture); those involved were
Muslims (the current of Islamophobia being an inherent part of the ori-
entalist lens of the mass media); and it violated middle-­class norms of
morality (as is the case with all crime stories). Shaima Ishaq (2010) has
pointed out that, prior to 2001, there were two cases of familial homi-
cides that resembled the Shafia case, but neither one was described as an
honor killing. The salience of honor killings as a particular form of femi-
cide is clearly a post-­9/11 phenomenon in the West. Through the panoptic
capacity of the mainstream media and the synopticons of social media,
honor killings have become the cipher signaling Muslims and their cul-
tures as a threat, thereby legitimizing the surveillance and profiling of
Muslim women, men, and their communities.
Gender plays a crucial role in this context. The body of the Muslim
woman is imbued with significations that define her as a threat but also
as a victim par excellence. When women are cast as victims who need to be
saved from “death by culture,” their bodies and the associated vulnera-

Violating In/Visibilities 91
bility they face rationalize state-­mediated interventions and the surveil-
lance of Muslim men. Compulsory visibility thus informs us, as a viewer
society, that the threat “they” represent needs to be kept at bay. “We,” as
the citizen audience, are in turn tasked with surveillance of these others.
In the meantime, the state outsources its surveillance to the countries
where Muslim immigrants come from in order to manage and mold them
to fit—albeit conditionally, as prostheticized citizens—into the Canadian
body politic. Once, in the country, they are subjected to a democratized
surveillance (surveillance with a small “s,” the surveillance of everyday
life).
In the final analysis, it can be argued that race (with all its signifiers
of difference) is the threshold calibrating visibility and invisibility, and
by corollary, absence or presence in the actuarial gaze. However, power is
implicit in structuring the relations whereby different groups of women
and men become the objects of the actuarial gaze or are located outside
of its glare.

Notes

1. “Hamed Shafia Begins Appeal of Murder Conviction,” Globe and Mail, 1 Feb-
ruary 2012, A3. There is a debate among Muslim scholars about whether, in fact,
honor killings are sanctioned by Islam. There is no mention of honor killings in the
Qur’an, and the words that reference violence against women are ambiguous and
open to interpretation (compare Ammar 2007; King 2009; R. M. Scott 2009).
2. The Globe and Mail, it should be noted, publishes sixteen newspapers across
the country and is owned by the Thomson family (also owners of Thomson-­Reuters)
in partnership with Bell Media, a major media conglomerate. Hence, its stories are
reproduced and often act as a catalyst for additional coverage on other media plat-
forms.
3. Kipling’s poem was printed in the Globe and Mail in the immediate aftermath
of September 11. The published extract privileges the following lines:

When you’re wounded and left

On Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out
To cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle
And Blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd
Like a soldier. (Barbar 2001, F4)

92 Yasmin Jiwani
 5
GENDER, RACE, AND AUTHENTICITY
Celebrity Women Tweeting for the Gaze

RACHEL E. DUBROFSKY AND MEGAN M. WOOD

While women’s bodies have long been objectified in popular media, social
media raise new questions key to feminism about women’s agency and
responsibility, since social-­media platforms ostensibly empower women
to operate the technologies that objectify and surveil them. Visual-­media
technologies—including surveillance technologies embedded in so-
cial media—are always already part of an objectifying process that has
particular implications for gendered bodies. We look at popular tabloid
coverage of women celebrities that feature their use of Twitter, specifi-
cally stories about celebrities posting pictures of themselves. What are
the implications when women are presented as having agency (taking
charge of how they are displayed), and therefore expressly complicit in
the creation of the images that display their bodies? How might a criti-
cal feminist perspective, with a focus on surveillance, make sense of the
gendered and racialized dimensions of visual social-­media practices of
self-­representation?
Celebrities are a particularly salient focus since the celebrity body, as
Imogen Tyler posits, “has become a central means through which con-
temporary social values are distributed and, through consumption, iden-
tification, and mimicry, become hardwired into everyday practices of
subjectivity” (2011, 24). Discussions of female celebrity bodies are noth-
ing new in the popular press, but the rise in the use of social media and
the increase in data-­valance (the tracking of people through data, espe-
cially digital data) add a new twist, with potentially new implications for
critical scholars interested in surveillance technologies when it comes to
questions of race and gender.
Discussion of the Twitter activity of celebrities in tabloid articles en-
ables the framing of women as agentic, empowered, and authentic in
their sexualized bodily displays: they control the means of objectifica-
tion and willingly self-­objectify. This dangerously elides the misogynist
context that hails them to perform in particular ways. A close exami-
nation of discussions of Miley Cyrus, a young white female singer, and
Kim Kardashian, a reality-­t v star who is often framed as a woman of
color in popular media, shows that while white women are presented as
actively fashioning their bodies for public display (through exercise and
diet), the few bodies of celebrities presented as women of color, such as
Kardashian, are positioned as always already gaze-­worthy, reducing their
agency.
Our work contributes to scholarly discussions about digital culture.1
While many academic studies on Twitter focus on mining data from
tweets to demonstrate trends in public opinion and behavior (Ahmad
2010; Dumenco 2011; Farhi 2009; Greer and Clark 2011; Lowery 2009),
this chapter is situated within a small, growing body of critical work on
digital media and surveillance. Some of this work looks critically at Face-
book, addressing its implications for gender identity and interaction
(Cohen and Shade 2010) and how digital environments like Facebook and
MySpace are organized around and shaped by race and class (boyd 2012).
Such work has explored the general relationship of race and the Internet
(Nakamura 2002; Everett 2009) and of race and software (Chun 2006);
the connection of the raced technology “gap” with other social and eco-
nomic “gaps” (Mack 2001); the use of technology by youth of color (Wat-
kins 2009); online hate groups (Daniels 2009); transnational identities
and collaborative ownership in digital-­media technologies (Ghosh 2005);
simulation gaming and racial identity (Galloway 2006); the racialization
of biotechnologies (Chow-­White 2012; Duster 2012; Nelson and Hwang
2012); and the critical intersections of race and digital media (Nakamura
and Chow 2012; Chopra and Gajjala 2011). We bring to the ongoing con-
versation scholarship on surveillance practices on television (Andrejevic
2004; Andrejevic 2006; Corner 2002; Couldry 2002; Dubrofsky 2011; Gil-
lespie 2000; McGrath 2004; Palmer 2002; Pecora 2002). Implicit in this

94 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood

essay is a call for feminist media scholars to update theorizing about the
gaze and for scholars doing work on technology, digital media, and sur-
veillance to take a transdisciplinary approach to account for the current
cultural landscape and critical implications for gendered and racialized
bodies and identities when it comes to practices of surveillance.

Method

Our focus is on Twitter because of its tremendous popularity (Papacha-

rissi 2010; Parmelee and Bichard 2013) and because celebrity activities on
Twitter are often mentioned in gossip columns, with frequent discussions
of celebrities posting photos.2 As of January 2014, Twitter had amassed
over 645 million users (Statistic Brain 2014), including 21 percent of the
U.S. adult population (Lunden 2013). Twitter is the most popular micro-
blog tool and is featured extensively in popular media. It is used daily by
political campaigns and news organizations, and it is also used for pub-
lic outreach by nonprofits and celebrities (Zhao and Rosson 2009, 245).
Since our interest is in the visual display of women’s bodies, we focus on
celebrity gossip magazine stories that discuss celebrities posting photo-
graphs of themselves on Twitter. We look at how the tabloids use celebrity
activity on Twitter to authenticate celebrity behavior. We take as a prem-
ise that the Twitter activity of celebrities is likely mediated by public-­
relations (pr) workers. However, our focus is not on the actual activities
of celebrities—or their pr teams—but rather on how tabloids, in their
stories, use the Twitter activities of celebrities to make statements about
the celebrities, particularly in ascribing agency and authenticity to their
actions.
Between March 2012 and October 2012, we collected articles from a
variety of online celebrity news blogs, mainstream tabloid websites, and
the website versions of mainstream celebrity gossip magazines. We did
this in two ways: first, we identified the top ten celebrity entertainment
magazine publications in the United States using the ShareRanks.com
database, which generates ranks for popular publications by genre based
on ratings collected by the website’s visitors. For the sake of practicality,
we eliminated publications that did not have a searchable archive or
didn’t focus on celebrity gossip. Our list included Us Weekly, Radar Online
(the online version of Star magazine), In Touch Weekly, and OK! maga-
zine, which together yielded between one thousand and three thousand
articles. Second, to find the most popular sources for celebrity gossip

Gender, Race, and Authenticity 95

based on number of hits using the Google search engine, we searched for
Twitter-­related keywords such as “Twitter,” “tweet,” “twitpic,” “hashtag,”
and “trending” in conjunction with the terms “celebrity” and “star,” which
yielded articles from various gossip blogs and gossip sites. Searching
Google, we generated more hits using the terms “celebrity + Twitter” than
by looking only at mainstream publications. We eliminated from both
sets of articles—online gossip blogs and celebrity entertainment maga-
zines—those that contained the keywords but did not relate to celebrity
Twitter use. Many of the websites have a “related stories” column adjacent
to the articles which identifies stories similar to the ones searched. In
some cases, our search was expanded by finding relevant articles in these
columns. The process produced a set of about one hundred articles. We
analyzed the articles for how women celebrities were discussed in terms
of bodily displays in photographs they posted of themselves on Twitter.
We also looked at the few articles we found on male celebrities and Twit-
ter: only fourteen out of one hundred articles were explicitly about male
celebrities. We examined these as a way of accessing the particular ways
in which the stories about women celebrities were gendered.
We see gender and race as culturally and contextually situated social
constructs, not as essential or biologically determined. We consider how
ideas about race and gender are constituted within the parameters of the
text—how race and gender are constructed through “digital bodies” (boyd
2007) and how these are presented in popular gossip magazines. By “digi-
tal bodies,” we mean the ways we “write ourselves into being” (Sundén
2003) online. Digital bodies convey information about physical bodies,
which includes visible markers that play a part in constructing a person’s
race or gender in a profile picture or twitpic.

The Gaze, Authenticity, and Empowerment

As discussed in the introduction to this volume, the rich body of femi-

nist scholarship on practices of looking has been concerned for quite
some time with the implications of surveillance practices for gendered
and racialized bodies, though the term surveillance is not explicitly used.
Building on Laura Mulvey’s influential work on the gaze (1975), John
Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright’s Prac-
tices of Looking (2001), and Shoshana Amielle Magnet’s (2007) work, the
framing of Twitter activities of celebrity women by tabloid magazines can
be usefully theorized using Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze in film. The

96 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood

male gaze regulates and structures its object within a social-­historical sys-
tem of gendered domination, tying “woman down to her place as bearer
of meaning, not maker of meaning” (Mulvey 1975, 6). Anne Kaplan notes
that even though one does not literally or necessarily have to be “male” to
own and activate the gaze, the male gaze functions as “masculine” (1983,
30): it occupies a masculine subject position—one that objectifies the
image gazed upon.
We pick up Magnet’s (2007) work examining the activities of users on
the website suicidegirls.com, which looks at what happens when the “ob-
jects” of the gaze are also the producers of the gaze, also what we look
at when examining the ways in which the activities of women celebri-
ties on Twitter are framed in the tabloids. The celebrity Twitter user is
a “prosumer” (blurring between the roles of consumer and producer: a
consumer who is also a producer of the product being consumed) (Tap-
scott and Williams 2007), and because what celebrities tweet is presented
as under their control—not an image produced by a filmmaker, for in-
stance—one cannot assert that they are being wrongfully objectified
by others. This instantiates claims to authenticity and agency, since the
celebrity creates her own image. Unlike in conventional notions of the
gaze, where the object of the gaze is not part of the production process,
the women posting photographs of themselves on Twitter are framed by
the tabloids as active participants in the process of producing the images
(even if, in fact, their accounts may be managed by a pr team). This is
similar to what Magnet (2007) observes with respect to suicidegirls.com.
What does it mean that these women are presented as the subjects and
objects of their own desiring: “owning” the gaze and explicitly aiding in
reproducing it?
Mulvey situates the image produced on the film screen as part of a
“hermetically sealed world . . . indifferent to the presence of the audi-
ence, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voy-
euristic phantasy” (1975, 9). On Twitter, this is not the setup: users bring
others—in real time—into their private (ostensibly “real”) worlds. As
well, the position of viewer and of the person gazed at can change (a gazed
at person becomes a viewer when he or she looks at a photograph another
person posts on Twitter, for instance). However, because we are looking
at how tabloids, in their stories about celebrities, discuss photographs
posted by celebrities, the dynamic outlined by Mulvey remains: readers
gaze upon the photographs reproduced in the tabloids, producing a setup
akin to a “hermetically sealed world” with a separation between the image

Gender, Race, and Authenticity 97

and the audience. But unlike in the scenario outlined by Mulvey, the
people being looked at are real people—not actors performing a role in
a film. As well, while Mulvey notes that in scripted films the spectator
is given “an illusion of looking in on a private world” (ibid.), on Twitter
and in the tabloid stories about celebrity use of Twitter this illusion is re-
configured, since the private world looked at is populated by real people
doing real things (rather than actors performing a role). The setup may
be contrived and orchestrated by the celebrity and a team of pr workers,
but similar to reality tv, there is what Dubrofsky (2011a) has elsewhere
termed a “call to the real.” The call to the real pinpoints the idea that de-
spite the constructed context of surveillance on reality tv shows, and the
fact of editing and labor by tv workers to shape the final product, the ele-
ment of real people filmed doing real things animates a sense that under-
neath it all there is something “real”: “real, authentic, surveilled selves
are constructed” (ibid., 22) at the same time as the genre denies this claim
by declaring that reality tv can access the real. Megan M. Wood (2013)
coins the term “call to authenticity” to describe, with particular empha-
sis on notions of authenticity, how Twitter animates the same paradox:
the more one is seen as disclosing via surveillance technologies like Twit-
ter, the more one is constructed as being “real.” People who are authentic
despite surveillance are presented as most authentic. For instance, when
a tweeting celebrity gets “in trouble” because of what she tweets, she is
seen as more authentic because, despite the context of surveillance, she
was completely herself and behaved as if she were not under surveillance;
or she is presented as overcome by real, strong emotion—feelings so real
that she expressed them despite the context of surveillance (and possible
negative consequences). The call to authenticity pinpoints the correlating
relationship between the extent of personal disclosure (including “slip-­
ups”) and perceived authenticity: the more one is seen as disclosing in
ways that belie the structure of surveillance of Twitter, the more one is
presented as being “real” (authentic).
Another noteworthy difference between Mulvey’s theorizing about
the gaze in film and how celebrities are configured in tabloid stories about
their Twitter activities is in how the feminine is framed. Mulvey positions
the feminine onscreen as passive, though inviting of the gaze, but in tab-
loid articles women celebrities are constructed as specifically active and
agentic in putting their images on display via Twitter and in their invita-
tion of the gaze (they post pictures themselves—they are not unknow-
ingly captured in a paparazzi shot or passively filmed by a film camera).

98 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood

In her essay on body scanners, Rachel Hall explains that willfully sub-
mitting to airport security “is coded as ‘hip’ in the postfeminist spirit of
agency and empowerment via preparation of the body in anticipation of
the male gaze” (this volume, 00). Similarly, celebrities displaying their
bodies on Twitter are presented as willing and self-­aware participants in
creating images to put on display and as actively fashioning the body for
consumption (through exercise). We bring into the conversation femi-
nist scholarship on postfeminism to highlight the ways Twitter is used
in the tabloid articles to forefront hypersexualized femininity as a form
of agentic empowerment through the call to authenticity.3 Briefly, post-
feminism is a discourse as well as a popular cultural context where gender
inequality is no longer an issue (McRobbie 2008), leaving a space for in-
tensified and troubling stereotypes of femininity to thrive (Ringrose and
Barajas 2011). The current cultural context of postfeminism implies that
women self-­representing online is empowering, giving them agency over
their identity making.4 The call to authenticity in this context animates
the idea that one “practices” female celebrity successfully by disclosing
on Twitter (Marwick and boyd 2011), enabling representations of women
who willingly subject themselves to the gaze as a form of agency. In so
doing, women are both lauded (empowerment in self-­representation)
and responsible for the consequences of this display.

Working for the Gaze: White Women on Display

Emphasizing notions of agency and empowerment, tabloid articles dis-

cussing the activities of white women celebrities on Twitter frame the
women as working hard (through diet and exercise) to fashion desirable
bodies ready for display. Notably, this trope is not present in tabloid dis-
cussions of the Twitter activities of celebrities framed as women of color.
This is a racialized idea. The number of articles discussing women of color
was also much lower than those discussing white women. White women
attest to their postfeminist desire to be agents in their own objectifi-
cation by working hard to shape bodies ready for display, and then use
surveillance technologies (Twitter) to show off these bodies. Women of
color, while presented as willingly inviting the gaze (through the post-
ing of photographs), are passive in their sexualization since their bodies
are articulated as always already gaze-­worthy, regardless of their actions.
Cyrus is a popular focus in the articles we examined. Cyrus is framed
as enthusiastically objectifying herself, aware that followers desire her,

Gender, Race, and Authenticity 99

and actively enticing them to gaze upon her body in a sexual manner.
For instance, Us Weekly writes, “Miley Cyrus may be a taken woman, but
she’s wooing her Twitter followers with what they’re missing! . . . The
19-­year-­old newly engaged star posted a new Twitter profile photo of her-
self wearing a tight crimson bustier top. The sexy ensemble pushes up her
cleavage and flaunts her tiny waist” (Eggenberger 2012a). Notably, none
of the stories state something neutral like “Cyrus posted a photograph of
her toned abs,” or “Cyrus is wearing shorts in this photograph,” instead
opting for terms that make her agentic”: “proudly” presenting her body,
“showing off,” “wooing” her followers, or “flaunting” her body. Her par-
ticipation suggests consent and engagement with modes of objectifica-
tion, as well as empowerment through her agency: the act of posting a
photograph on Twitter verifies that Cyrus eagerly embodies and invites
the male gaze, and her own actions (posting of twitpics) attest to her au-
thentic desire to objectify herself.
Stories regularly mention Cyrus’s diet and workout routine, posi-
tioning the act of posting photographs on Twitter as her way of proudly
displaying the results of her hard work: Us Weekly writes, “Miley Cyrus
showed off her long and lean stems—sculpted by her daily Pilate’s ses-
sions—on Twitter Monday” (Finlayson 2012a). Another story details that
“the singer has been proudly showing off the results of her frequent work-
out sessions—and controversial gluten-­free diet—by flaunting her abs in
midriff-­baring tops and her legs in short rompers” (ibid.). In yet another
story, Cyrus is said to be “flaunting . . . her diminishing weight” (Ornstein
2012), and in one more, she “showed off her new look” (Radar Staff 2012a).
Radar Online labels Cyrus’s actions as “ ‘Look at me!’” moves in a story
titled “Flesh-­Flaunting Miley Cyrus Is Sending ‘A Terribly Sick Message,’
to Young Women,” about her posting of a Twitter photograph (Goodhand
2012). Not only does Cyrus seemingly enthusiastically post photographs
of herself, but embedded in the stories about these activities are refer-
ences to the hard work she does on her body to warrant the attention of
the male gaze, attesting to Cyrus’s (ostensible) desire to attract the male
gaze. Importantly, the stories salaciously frame Cyrus’s body in terms of
the labor she does on her body.
What we outline isn’t particular to Cyrus, though she was the focus of a
significant portion of the articles we gathered. A few notable examples of
other white women celebrities portrayed in a similar fashion are Fergie,
of the music group Black Eyed Peas; Britney Spears, a popular female
singer; and Heidi Klum, a celebrity model and reality-­t v star. Fergie,

100 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood

we are told, “showed off her bangin’ bikini body via Twitter in Cancun,
. . . flaunted major cleavage and proudly displayed her rock hard abs in a
printed two-­piece” (Z. Johnson 2012). Klum, “Project Runway’s sexy host,
39, shared a few photos of her skimpy bikini bod—and massive cleav-
age—with her Twitter followers . . . [and] revealed her taut tummy and
sexy cleavage” (Corneau 2012d). Spears has “got a bangin’ bikini bod! . . .
[T]he pop superstar—flanked by her sons in swim trunks—showed off
her toned bikini bod in a purple swimsuit in a photo posted to her Twitter
page” (Corneau 2012a). Like the stories about Cyrus, the work the women
put into shaping their bodies is consistently referenced, presented as part
of what makes them proud to show their bodies: they worked hard to ar-
rive at this point, and their reward is to display their bodies for all to see.
Hall refers to this body fashioning as “a gendered model of reflexive gov-
ernance” (this volume, 136)—that is, women self-­reflexively participate
in and regulate the display of their bodies.
Discussion of the photographs in the tabloids relies on a call to au-
thenticity, since the photographs are presented as unmediated (though
the photographs might be the result of much work on the part of pr
teams), invoking a postfeminist logic where women are empowered and
agentic through self-­generated authentic sexualized displays. The work
to fashion the body fits with notions of ideal U.S. citizenship, coupled
with a postfeminist ethos: those who succeed are those who work hard.
Efforts women put into their appearance work hand-­in-­hand with the
invitation to gaze upon their carefully fashioned bodies: they labored to
produce this body and their reward is for us to gaze with desire. The more
effort the white women put into crafting their bodies for consumption,
the stronger the invitation to gaze upon their bodies. The male gaze is a
reward for white women willing to put in the necessary hard work.

Always Already Gaze-­Worthy: A Woman of Color

Kim Kardashian is one of the most discussed celebrities in the articles col-
lected during the time frame we examined. In terms of race, Kardashian’s
mother, Kris Jenner, is of English, Dutch, and Scottish ancestry, and her
deceased father, Robert Kardashian, was an Armenian American.5 Kim
Kardashian is, as far as conventional notions of race go, Caucasian. How-
ever, if one googles “Kim Kardashian” and “race,” it is apparent that there
are ongoing conversations about Kardashian’s racialization. Scholars note
that Kardashian’s relationship to race is complicated at best. Kardashian

Gender, Race, and Authenticity 101

has markers that can signify her as a woman of color, making her not
quite white (see Haltiwanger 2010; Peterson 2010): her dark complexion
and curvy body are used to racialize her in the popular press (Natisse
2010), as are her relationships with black men. The manner in which the
tabloid articles we examine discuss Kardashian’s Twitter activity reflects
Kardashian’s complicated relationship to whiteness and racialization,
poignantly illustrating how racialization is situated and contextual, not
essential.
Stories about Kardashian posting pictures on Twitter consistently ar-
ticulate her in even more sexual terms than white celebrities, her body
framed as innately sexual, rather than as gaze-­worthy because of the
hard work she puts into it (even if, in fact, Kardashian may labor on her
body), with an excessive sexualized focus on her curves, especially her
derriere. This is a presentation usually reserved for women of color, espe-
cially Latina and black women, and is how Rihanna, a female celebrity of
color (black Caribbean) is discussed in the tabloids during the time period
we studied.6 Kardashian is repeatedly framed as irrepressibly sexual, pos-
sessing a limitless ability to arouse: “Kim heated things up by sharing be-
yond racy photos of herself,” writes Radar Online, followed by “less than a
day later, Kim daringly posted a sexy snap of herself down on all fours and
flaunting her bombshell booty in what appears to be a black thong, thigh-­
high boots and a cropped and fringed leather jacket” (Radar Staff 2012c).
Kardashian’s sexuality is characterized as surreal, exceptional, and un-
natural. For instance, her body’s sexual appeal seems to defy even the
English language: new words are created to describe her assets. Detailing
a twitpic, Radar Online writes, “The boobiful reality star shows off her as-
sets in a red bikini top and coverlet, soaking wet with the caption ‘Wet &
wild’” (Radar Staff 2012c, emphasis added). Later that year, Radar Online
again found itself at a loss for words in the English language: “Kim Kar-
dashian loves showing off her bikini body—even without any touch-­ups!
The bootyful reality star posted a pic of her crazy curves poured into a
skimpy swimsuit, boasting it was ‘Photoshop-­free’” (Ornstein 2012, em-
phasis added). Kardashian’s body is not only inherently superhumanly
sexy, but exceeds the confines of the feminine human form, wild, animal-
istic, and out of bounds; it cannot be tamed by a bikini or a thong, instead
arousingly spilling out all over the place because of her “crazy curves” and
“beyond racy” physique. Kardashian’s body is discussed as if it has a will
of its own, divorced from any actions she might take. At the same time,

102 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood

her attributes are essentialized, ascribed to a body that no amount of
dieting or exercise could fashion. Her spectacular form occurs naturally,
without express effort on her part.
The absence of the trope of diet and exercise in stories about Kar-
dashian puts into relief the implications of framing white women as ac-
tively cultivating male desire through the work they do on their bodies:
Kardashian’s body, articulated as that of a woman of color, is always al-
ready an object of male desire, regardless of her actions—always already
gaze-­worthy, naturally awe-­inspiring without the need for touch-­ups
(Photoshop-­free). Significantly, her body unwittingly drives the public
into a sexual frenzy, suggesting Kardashian has an inherent, irrepressible,
animalistic sexuality that is beyond her power. Pointedly, Kardashian’s
sexuality is not, as it is with Cyrus, under her control. Hypersexualizing
Kardashian and discussing her body as if it has a will of its own works to
position Kardashian as not human, as a sexual animal that cannot be con-
tained or controlled, that arouses everyone around her regardless of her
intentions. Key in this setup is that Kardashian’s agency is removed in
her sexuality: she is denied even the postfeminist hint of empowerment
through self-­fashioning ascribed to white celebrities.
The racialization of Kardashian gains salience within a larger histori-
cal context. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) argues that the subjection of black
women’s bodies on the auction block during the nineteenth century—a
founding surveillance technology of the white supremacist U.S. state, as
Katherine McKittrick (2006) reminds us—haunts current depictions of
black bodies. Under this type of surveillance, black bodies were put on
display in a central space for potential buyers to gaze upon, chattel for
sale, and thus denied human status and agency. As is the case with the
white women celebrities, Kardashian is presented as complicit in her own
objectification by readily posting photographs of herself on Twitter. This
willing objectification has particular racialized implications, since Kar-
dashian’s sexuality, unlike that of white women, is presented as instinc-
tive and beyond her control, and her ability to sexually arouse is natural-
ized. In this setup, Kardashian is at once configured as eagerly serving a
white supremacist imperative through the act of posting revealing photo-
graphs of herself and positioned as unable to control her own sexuality,
which is presented as driving others into a sexual frenzy. Kardashian may
be an active and keen participant, but she has no control over what hap-
pens once she agrees to participate.

Gender, Race, and Authenticity 103

Closing Thoughts: Gendered Narratives

Twitter enables writers of tabloid articles to imbue white female celebri-

ties with a particular kind of strategic postfeminist agency whereby they
willingly put themselves on display and in so doing can be positioned as
authentically desirous of the gaze through the work they do to cultivate
this gaze. Kardashian, on the other hand, framed as a woman of color,
is not afforded the same agency, her body articulated as naturally invit-
ing the gaze regardless of her actions or desires. Nevertheless, in discuss-
ing photographs posted on Twitter by women celebrities, tabloid articles
consistently reference the agency of each woman in inviting the gaze:
they choose to post the photographs, they do so willingly. This rhetoric
is not unlike “rape myth” discourse, in which a woman who previously
consented to sex or a woman who dresses provocatively “asked for it”
(Tazlitz 1999; Torrey 1991). In this case, the act of posting pictures of one-
self on Twitter naturalizes white supremacist heterosexist patriarchy. The
images are always already part of a misogynist culture, making it diffi-
cult to pinpoint the ways in which the visual display of women’s bodies is
consistently problematic in a culture where women are disenfranchised.
This enables a logic whereby women celebrities are agents in the stories
produced about them, dislocating them from a cultural context in which
women’s bodies are fetishized and obfuscates the demands to perform
female celebrity in particular ways—authentic-­seeming sexualized dis-
plays—facilitated by the use of social media. Underlying this presenta-
tion is the idea that feminism is obsolete for white women, since they
have full control over the means of objectification: they are not being ob-
jectified by patriarchy (or the press); they are freely opting to fashion the
images they put on display. For women of color, the picture is bleaker:
they do not fully participate in their own objectification, but rather are
always already there to be gazed upon with desire, regardless of their ac-
tions.
Though tabloids might present white women as having some degree of
agency, this agency is limited, which becomes particularly salient when
examined alongside articles about male celebrities on Twitter. The first
and most striking thing is the quantity of stories about female celebrities
that discuss their Twitter activity versus the scarcity of stories about male
celebrities and their Twitter activities, even though some of the most fa-
mous Twitter celebrities are male (e.g., Ashton Kutcher, Charlie Sheen,
Justin Bieber—all white—and Kanye West, who is black).7 As stated

104 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood

earlier, only fourteen out of one hundred of the articles we collected are
explicitly about male celebrities; twenty-­four additional ones mention
male celebrities, but focus on celebrity women.
The Twitter activity of male stars featured in the tabloids, in contrast
to stories about the Twitter activities of their female counterparts, are not
articulated through a focus on their sexuality and a desire to put them-
selves on visual display. We found only one article that discussed a pic-
ture of a shirtless male torso, which was tweeted by Pauly D (an Italian
American participant on the reality show Jersey Shore). His posting was
discussed as a reaction to an unflattering photo leaked to the Internet
earlier: he posted the picture to “prove the unflattering photo . . . was not
how he normally looks” (Eggenberger 2012c). In other words, he was not
“exposing,” “flaunting,” or “showing himself off” in a way that reveals his
desire for sexual attention (which is how similar actions by women are
characterized); rather, he posted the photo to “prove” (read: control) rep-
resentations of his appearance.
Though not the focus of this essay, tabloid discussions of women celeb-
rities’ Twitter activity often mention their mental and emotional states in
order to evaluate their character. We note this because it is striking that
in the tabloid stories about the activities of male celebrities on Twitter,
where the emotional state of the men might seem just as likely a focus
as it usually is for the women, it was not. At worst, the men are seen to
have momentary lapses in judgment, and at best, their tweets are consid-
ered intentional performances. The disclosures of the men are treated as
a reaction to a specific set of circumstances. For instance, when Charlie
Sheen, who made headlines for much of 2011 for drug and alcohol abuse
and marital problems, deleted his Twitter account, the website tmz re-
ported that he had done so “because he just didn’t feel like he was getting
anything out of the Social Network anymore” (tmz Staff 2012a). When he
reactivated the account, tabloid speculation did not focus on why he had
quit to begin with or whether he was mentally stable (as it usually does
with women in these situations), but emphasized his “upcoming episode
of ‘Anger Management’ ” (his new TV show) and how he intended to keep
his tweeting “professional.”8
Men are given license to “rant and rave” (Corneau 2012b), to “apolo-
gize,” “joke,” “misfire” (Dobuzinskis 2011), and to be “misconstrued” (Cor-
neau 2012c), with tabloid discussions centering on their actions as pro-
fessional extensions of their celebrity careers. In contrast, the majority
of Twitter activity by celebrity women is presented in tabloid articles as

Gender, Race, and Authenticity 105

indicative of deep-­seated personality flaws, emotional and mental insta-
bility, or a strong desire to attract the male gaze. Most strikingly, tabloid
stories about women celebrities use Twitter activity to verify and authen-
ticate them as willing sexual objects, while in stories about male celebri-
ties, Twitter activity serves as no more than a professional tool.

Notes

1. Earlier works focusing on online gaming culture and similar digital social en-
vironments highlight the fluidity of online identity and the ways individuals can
disrupt the usual constraints of gender, race, and sexual identity performance on-
line (Bruckman 1992; Burris and Hoplight 1996; Dickel 1995; Poster 1995; Turkle
1995). Other scholars examine the ethics of studying user interaction online
(Acland 2009; Hookway 2008; Jacobson 1999), as well as issues of privacy and how
users manage personal information (boyd 2008; Lenhart and Madden 2007; O’Neil
2001; Tyma 2007). Recent qualitative studies on social media have centered on the
popular social-­networking site Facebook, exploring its use by students (Stern and
Taylor 2007; Walther et al. 2008), its geography and structure (Dubrofsky 2011b;
Papacharissi 2009), its role in interpersonal relationships (Tong et al. 2008), and
its use in education (Mazer, Murphy, and Simonds 2007).
2. Users can tweet photos to their followers (“twitpics”), which stream on pro-
files as regular tweets, showing either the picture or providing a link to the picture
in a different webpage, depending on the devices used to upload data and view
Twitter.
3. See Dow 1996; Projansky 2001; Walters 1995.
4. See Attwood 2011; Banet-­Weiser 2012; Ringrose 2011.
5. Historians and activists note that the categorization of Armenians as Cauca-
sian is complicated given the racial genocide of Armenians in the early twentieth
century (Akçam 2012; Shirinian 2012).
6. There were not enough stories about Rihanna for a focus on her.
7. A list of the top 100 most followed Twitter accounts, which is refreshed daily,
can be found at Twitter Counter, http://twittercounter.com/pages/100/.
8. See Corneau 2012c; tmz Staff 2012a; tmz Staff 2012b.

106 Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood

 6
HELD IN THE LIGHT
Reading Images of Rihanna’s Domestic Abuse

KELLI D. MOORE

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s (2001) notion of the “analytics of raciality” and

Sally Engle Merry’s (2001; 2002) concept of the “regime of domestic vio-
lence governmentality” prompt my analysis of how black women’s bodies
have been written, through photography, into the culture of white do-
mesticity in the United States and the institution of law. I am inspired
by Ferreira da Silva’s argument that to account for how race operates as
a “strategy of power in modernity,” we must “address the very conditions
of production of the symbolic mechanisms deployed in the constitution
of people of color as modern subaltern subjects” (2001, 427). In this essay
I consider the nineteenth-­century criminal mug shot and Mammy por-
trait as photographic genres that established visual codes of whiteness
and femininity. Ancestors to police images of battered women, the mug
shot and Mammy image fix the body before an aesthetic-­scientific gaze
crucial to the production of the legal reasoning that undergirds slave and
criminal law.
As a way of accessing the issues at stake in my argument, I attend to
the use of the camera flash in police photographs of the battered face
of the popular U.S. singer Rihanna Fenty, who is black and originally
from Barbados. My analysis of the images shows how women are situ-
ated as scientific objects, placed in an antagonistic relationship to cam-
era lighting: the flash regulates skin color to produce the subject of do-
mestic abuse. Ferreira da Silva’s and Merry’s theories clarify the function
of Rihanna’s image as facilitating what Christine Shearer-­Cremean and
Carol L. Winkelmann (2004) note are contradictory, temporal, and con-
tingent trauma narratives of battered women.1
I also examine Sham Ibrahim’s multimedia artwork of Rihanna titled
Disturbia (2009) and Rihanna’s television appearance on abc’s 20/20 in
November 2009. Ferreira da Silva’s analysis of raciality is helpful in situ-
ating these as significant moments in which the black female subject of
domestic violence gets written into law and public culture. I add to this
an analysis of what I call Rihanna’s “coming into voice” on 20/20 about
her abuse, which follows Lisa Cartwright’s (2008) articulation of the
“coming into voice” of subjects with communication disorders who learn
to speak through human and technological facilitators. For Cartwright,
facilitated communication opens a space of empathic identification or
moral spectatorship that is constitutive of the extralegal space in which
Ibrahim and Rihanna respond to police photography of domestic vio-
lence. Ibrahim’s multimedia artwork and Rihanna’s appearance on 20/20
critique the scenes of visual evidence gathered by police, which trans-
mogrified these into signifying visual codes of whiteness and femininity.
The use of light and color across different media and materials—digital
media, skin, fabric, and cosmetics—serve as nonverbal forms of commu-
nication that facilitate “coming into voice” and the production of subjec-
tivity in the prosecution of domestic abuse.

Photography and the Analytics of Raciality:

From the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-­First

In the late 1990s the legal historian Jennifer Mnookin remarked, “De-
spite more than 125 years of photography’s sustained legal use, the his-
tory of photographic evidence remains almost entirely untold” (1998, 7).
Police photographs of battered women, like the police image of Rihanna’s
battered face, have no official label that mark their unique history and
rhetorical functions as legal institutional photography, as coveted ob-
jects of criminal procedure, and as prime movers in the aesthetic prac-
tices of the criminal courtroom in the United States. Accumulating in
police databases since the 1980s, images of battered women are treated
by law professionals and the public as visual evidence. Their untold, un-
marked relation to the scientific apparatus of racism obstructs the view

108 Kelli D. Moore
of the gendered and racialized conditions under which this body of pho-
tography proliferates. Images of battered women are key artifacts of the
regime of evidence-­based domestic violence, the emergence of which in
the late twentieth century is largely overlooked.
Merry uses the term “regime of domestic violence governmentality”
to refer to Anglo-­American legal procedures that regulate intimate af-
fective relationships in the twentieth century (2001; 2002). Her analysis
attends to how the state authorizes the containment of domestic abuse
and the regulation of communication between intimate partners. Pro-
tection orders, mandatory arrest, no-­drop prosecution, and intervention
programs are meant to effect changes in the subjectivities of batterers
and battered women.2 No-­drop procedural action requires police to pur-
sue charges, provided there is evidence of probable cause, with or with-
out the victim’s consent, while mandatory arrest demands that police re-
sponding to domestic disturbance calls arrest abusive partners. Strategies
of evidence-­based prosecution remove police discretion, which previously
fueled inaction on domestic-­abuse investigations. State policies produce
particular forms of gendered subjectivities where male batterers are
typically disciplined and punished for abusive behavior, and female vic-
tims are overwhelmingly protected by state orders which designate geo-
graphical and physical spaces of safety and security. Police photographs of
domestic-­violence injuries, providing visual evidence of domestic assault,
as in the case of Rihanna, are an important component of the paperwork
generated when police initiate a domestic-­violence investigation.
In Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Ferreira da Silva accounts for
the centrality of human difference in the production of juridical univer-
sality—the law of reason—in post-­Enlightenment thought. The idea of
race precedes Enlightenment rationality. Racism is more than an exclu-
sionary practice documented by the sciences. The biological and social
sciences manufacture evidence of human difference, ultimately forming
an apparatus of knowledge, which I propose produces the legal subject of
domestic abuse. Ferreira da Silva’s analysis of raciality argues that “black-
ness and whiteness indicate distinct kinds of modern subjects [including]
how the white body and the social (geographic, economic and symbolic)
spaces associated with whiteness have been produced to signify the prin-
ciples of universal equality and freedom informing our conceptions of the
Just, the Legal and the Good” (2001, 423, emphasis in original). The scene
in which the subject becomes caught up, absorbed, overwhelmed within
techniques of normalization is described in terms of engulfment—a key

Held in the Light 109

aspect of the analytics of raciality that tracks the intricate circumstances
and positioning of Rihanna on camera. Both the “analytics of raciality”
and the “regime of domestic violence governmentality” take their cue
from Foucault’s concept of biopower—the techniques of power mobilized
by nation-­states in the normalization and management of populations.
Ferreira da Silva’s and Merry’s respective analyses add nuance to the work
and affects of biopower. Their work encourages the discernment of the
somatization of biopolitical technique, which is produced as experiences
of global space and interiority, and as I demonstrate, is the function of
whiteness in Rihanna’s engulfment in the racialized regime of domestic-­
violence governmentality.
The “analytics of raciality” describes an aesthetic arsenal that “consis-
tently rewrites post-­Enlightenment European consciousness and social
configurations in transparency” (Ferreira da Silva 2007, 20). As aesthetico-­
scientific texts that lay open the body, photographs are endowed with
the ability to rewrite the body of the racial other into new photographic
genres. The nineteenth-­century and post-­Reconstruction eras designate
key moments in which the racial other was produced through scenes of
representation whose violence are rearticulated in the police image of Ri-
hanna’s battered face. For example, Jonathan Finn (2009) observes that
human racial difference structured nineteenth-­century experimentation
with photographic technology, ultimately shaping legal institutional
practices of how criminality was visualized.3 Experiments with photo-
graphic technology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
were part of the discourse of scientific racism and established disciplinary
power relations between the photographer and the photographed. From
Louis Agassiz’s coerced portraits of slaves born in Africa, to Francis
Galton’s experiments with composite portraiture documenting “success-
ful” and “unsuccessful” human breeding, to Alphonse Bertillon’s system
of anthropometric measurement of the criminal, the first half-­century of
photographic technology documented experimental practices of looking,
measuring, and categorizing the human body according to a transcenden-
tal hierarchy of higher and lower orders of humanity. Photographs of the
criminal and the asylum inmate, and the slave daguerreotype emerged
concurrently and displaced the prison as the quintessential model of legal
panopticism. These institutional gazes developed as sciences; their power
to categorize and identify continues to find diverse state and private ap-
plications in human fingerprinting, dna analysis, and facial-­recognition
technology (Finn 2009; Gates 2011; Magnet 2011).

110 Kelli D. Moore
 Laura Wexler’s (2000) analysis of the photos of black nursemaids
frequently referred to as “mammies,” moves away from the site of the
criminal mug shot and slave daguerreotype to illustrate the produc-
tion of human difference and femininity. Wexler’s discussion of Mammy
photos adds a crucial photographic link to the management of domes-
tic relationships that Merry describes. Mammy portraits regulated post-
slavery domestic relations in the United States. The images functioned
as important tokens of sentimental feeling for white masters of black
women held in bondage. Post-­Reconstruction, white keepers of black
female labor engaged in photography practices that displayed “few or no
visible debilitating marks of slavery” through sartorial details and gestu-
ral comportment (Wexler 2000, 74).4 The images are distinctive for the
clean, dignified, ladylike poses in which black nursemaids were photo-
graphed, often holding their tiny white charges while wearing stylish and
morally tasteful dresses. Wexler’s concept of the “innocent eye” explains
the representational practices in which middle-­class white women were
portrayed “as if looking out from within, without seeing, the race and
class dynamics of the household” (ibid., 6). The “innocent eye” is a sen-
timental photographic gaze that imagines the black nursemaid accord-
ing to visual codes of white femininity. These images wrought a “tender
violence” that reordered white consciousness through a sentimental and
innocent photographic gaze by exploiting the black nursemaid’s apparent
“absence of wounding” from slavery (ibid., 74). The “absence of wound-
ing” displayed in Mammy portraiture and the presence of wounding in
the Rihanna image derive from the same aesthetic arsenal. By analyzing
the crucial role of photography in rationalizing the postslavery domes-
tic sphere in the United States, Wexler aesthetically situates the black
nursemaid’s fragmentary ascendance into whiteness via sentimental ap-
pearance. The particular aesthetic practices embedded in the image of Ri-
hanna’s abuse offer a window into the role of photography in domestic-­
violence adjudication.
The technical recording of Rihanna’s injuries involved a complex nego-
tiation between skin color and skin trauma mediated by camera lighting
and physical comportment. The close-­up image features the singer with
her eyes closed. Her lips and nose appear swollen. There are abrasions
and bruises on both sides of her forehead and cheeks. She has what looks
like the beginning of two black eyes. Her short, jet-­black hair disappears
into the black background of the image. Awash in light, the performer’s
complexion appears whitened by the camera flash. If, as Ferreira da Silva

Held in the Light 111

6.1 Los Angeles Police Department photograph of Rihanna’s injuries, 2009.
(2007) argues, the very concept of post-­Enlightenment rationality is in-
formed by the idea of race, the flash photography that dissipates Ri-
hanna’s skin color and throws her wounds into relief produces the black
female body as a limit of legal reason. Legal photography institutes a
mode of representation that focuses on the body’s exterior, or phenotypic
qualities. In domestic-­violence cases the state is interested in overseeing
over time the development of bruises, punctures, scrapes, and so forth to
provide evidence of abuse for criminal-­trial juries. The police image sim-
plifies into a “look” (Mulvey 1975) the complex affective and cultural re-
lationships animating the violence between the black U.S. recording artist
Chris Brown and Rihanna. The photograph voyeuristically focuses public
attention on the presence of physical wounds that are legally actionable.
Held by the camera flash, the singer’s appearance displays visual codes
of whiteness and femininity reminiscent of the graceful and dignified
poses of black nursemaids. Similar to the proper dresses and groomed
hairstyles that ostensibly incorporated the black nursemaid into white
domesticity postslavery, Rihanna’s whitened skin provides her access to
“the Just, the Legal and the Good,” which Ferreira da Silva (2001) associ-
ates with post-­Enlightenment rationality. The image of Rihanna’s abuse
writes her black female body into the “regime of domestic violence gov-
ernmentality” through visual codes of whiteness.
Richard Dyer (1997) observes how whiteness as signification emerges
in the modern era in part through the technocultural production of
movie-­lighting techniques.5 Whiteness demands technological projec-
tion where the preferred subject of the camera gaze appears “whiter than
white” (Dyer 1997, 122). Dyer identifies the theater stage and television
studio as quintessential technical realms where the production of white-
ness and femininity is supplemented through cosmetics and lighting
techniques. Visual whiteness is privileged in part through photographic
regimes that control the hue and brightness of skin color. For the black
subject, then, the scene of photography can operate as a “scene of regula-
tion” in which the black body is normalized by the whitening camera flash
(ibid., 4). Seated still before the police camera, Rihanna’s pose is that of
a scientific specimen, passive, immobile. Placed in an antagonistic rela-
tion to light, her image renders the structural antagonism between the
black female body and the techniques of juridical universality. Pivoting
from what he sees as a preoccupation with ideas of movement and pas-
sage in academic work on slavery, Harvey Young (2010) argues that still-
ness is an overlooked performance that negotiates the representation of

Held in the Light 113

the black body in visual media. The law’s institutional documentation of
domestic violence demands a performance of stillness which Young iden-
tifies in the coerced daguerreotype images of slaves born in Africa. The
close-­up shot of Rihanna’s head, cut off from the rest of her body, centers
her closed eyes and bruised skin, recalling the intimate gaze of the genre
of Victorian memento mori, sentimental postmortem photography. Ri-
hanna’s deathly stillness is a performance of submission that coordinates
with the camera flash that bombards her skin with light, isolating and
throwing into relief the trauma to her skin that is already in the process
of disappearing from the gaze of juridical universality.
In a sense, battered women are literally “to be looked at” (Mulvey 1975)
by the state in a strategy of engulfment exemplified by Charles Goodwin’s
(1994) concept of “professional vision.” Professional vision refers to the
discursive practices—such as highlighting, coding schemes, and produc-
tion of graphic representations—used by professionals to see and record.
In his discussion of how law professionals deconstructed the video shot
by George Holliday in 1991 of Rodney King being brutalized by police,
Goodwin asserts “central to the social and cognitive organization of a
profession is its ability to shape events in the domain of its scrutiny into
the phenomenal objects around which the discourse of the profession is
organized” (1994, 29). The use of light in flash photography to disasso-
ciate skin color from skin trauma is constitutive of police professional
vision and seeks to regulate claims about domestic abuse. Forensic-­
evidence photography guides confirm the role of professional vision in
the governance regimes Merry examines. Evidence photography guides
and reports recommend a variety of procedures for documenting abuse.
For example, point-­and-­shoot single-­lens reflex cameras over 35 mm
do not have a focusing distance that fill the (camera) frame (Pex 2000).
High-­resolution digital images have supplanted Polaroid technology in
domestic-­violence cases (Etengoff 2002; Kershaw 2002). Digital cameras
are thought best for documenting bite marks, scratches, scars, and cuts,
but not for bruises unless blood accumulation is close to the skin surface.
The best time to photograph is between two and five days after injuries
are sustained. The priority of capturing the disappearing injury is also
evinced by police instructions about the manipulation of light for opti-
mum exposure (Pex 2000). As one police protocol recommends, “Visible
light penetrates into the skin deeper than uv light and is sufficient to
document most bruises. Addition of special wavelength sources and fil-
ters can improve the visualization of [a battered woman’s] injuries by en-

114 Kelli D. Moore
hancing the blue color and improving the contrast against the normal
skin tones” (Pex 2000, 1). The use of the penetration metaphor is not
inconsequential here, nor is the police photographer’s reference to “nor-
mal” skin tones. Photography guides imply that the photographer needs
to pass through the epidermal boundary into the “inner life” of the dark-­
skinned subject. As police-­photography instructions attempt to manage
skin color through lighting practices, something like Goodwin’s idea of
professional vision performs its “sovereign role as a regulating power”
(Ferreira da Silva 2007, xvi).
Rihanna’s whitened appearance models an institutional disciplinary
practice of entering the black female body into the domain of univer-
sal justice under the cover of whiteness and femininity. Whitened out
by the camera flash, Rihanna’s image recalls the controversial 1994 Time
cover featuring O. J. Simpson, whose face had been darkened to make
for a more threatening mug shot of an accused killer of a white woman.
Darkness and masculinity associate Simpson with the highest form of
criminal behavior, while, in contrast, visual whiteness and femininity
render Rihanna an empathetic witness. Both images presume a trans-
parent body, which aligns with Rachel Hall’s arguments about how the
“aesthetics of transparency” (this volume) function in privileging white
bodies at ­airports.

Reading Photography of Rihanna’s Abuse

The police photography of Rihanna’s domestic abuse facilitated critical

responses to the visual epistemologies of law enforcement and Rihanna’s
own experience of “coming into voice” about the violence she endured. The
online tabloid tmz published the police image documenting the singer’s
injuries days after the assault. Kevin Glynn coins the term “investigative
tabloidism” to describe the “morally motivated and self-­consciously ad-
versarial stance” (2000, 124) that leads tabloid media into melodrama,
which I argue, has created an extralegal space to work through issues of
victimization and grievance in Rihanna’s assault case. In Moral Spectator-
ship (2008), Cartwright uses the concept of “working through” to exam-
ine the role of technology in facilitating disordered communication in the
genre of deaf women’s film. Cartwright pivots away from Freud’s idea of
working through as it relates to the talking cure to suggest that “we might
also look to nonverbal vocalization, gesture, gaze, and touch—all present
in the field of play—as important means through which acting out and

Held in the Light 115

working through are carried forward between analysand and analyst”
(2008, 57). tmz’s investigation of the Rihanna case led to extralegal criti-
cal responses that took up the transparent aesthetics constitutive of the
knowledge-­making practices of the police. The responses from Ibrahim
and Rihanna came in the form of nonverbal communication, by which
color, textiles, images from popular culture, and light were mobilized to
“talk back” to the regime of knowledge in which the experience of domes-
tic abuse was reduced to a coveted photographic “look.” The transpar-
ent aesthetics practiced by law enforcement operate through an associa-
tion between objectivity and whiteness. The visual disclosure of domestic
abuse that would bring battered women into the domain of universal jus-
tice occurs by reference to the cultural codes of white femininity, a coding
forefronted in Rihanna’s interview on abc’s 20/20 and in Ibrahim’s art.

Disturbia

The new-­media artwork by Ibrahim, Disturbia (2009), critiques how

images of battered women—objects of police surveillance—are trans-
formed into images for public consumption. Ibrahim created a form of
appropriation art by modeling the police image of Rihanna after Andy
Warhol’s 1962 silkscreen Marilyn Diptych. The reworked image of Ri-
hanna’s abused face, published on Ibrahim’s personal website, was digi-
tally altered from a copy published by tmz. In his rendition, Ibrahim rep-
licates the garish color palette used in the comic strips Warhol used to
reframe a screen shot of Marilyn Monroe from the film noir Niagara.6
The still image of Monroe used in Marilyn Diptych was captured for
a publicity shot for the film. Created a few weeks after the movie star’s
death, Marilyn Diptych rehearsed the industrial mode of production with
the massive manufacture of identical, interchangeable factory goods.
Warhol’s use of color in the piece juxtaposed twenty-­five color images of
Monroe with twenty-­five black-­and-­white images of the star. Art histori-
ans suggest that the movement between the vitality of the color images
and the dull, smudged ink of the black and white images signify the life
and death of Monroe.7 Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych preempts Rihanna’s
police image, specifically its citation of the memento mori genre of pho-
tography. Warhol’s work may have also sought to mark the production of
the film in Technicolor—a rarity for film noir at that time.8
Disturbia is suggestive of Dyer’s argument that the white face oper-
ates as a form of media control (1997, 94). Rihanna’s battered face is re-

116 Kelli D. Moore
6.2 Disturbia (mixed-­media artwork). ©2009 Sham Ibrahim.
peated in a series, rewriting Warhol’s original repetition of the face of
Monroe. In Marilyn Diptych, Warhol keyed into the process of mechanized
production, aligning an iconic vision of white femininity with the serial-
ized outputs of assembly-­line production. The serialized repetition of the
white female face is an example of how the “primary effect of the power of
race has been to produce universality itself” (Ferreira da Silva 2007, 427).
In Disturbia Ibrahim draws Rihanna into the domain of universal justice
by substituting copies of Rihanna’s face for Monroe’s. Rihanna and the
marks of violence on her face are linked to Marilyn Monroe’s iconic per-
formances of white femininity.
Ibrahim’s interpretation of Rihanna’s image is a gesture acknowledg-
ing new modes of production enabled by fiber-­optic networks, in par-
ticular publicity images. Understood in terms of unrestricted movement,
publicity is a commodity that wants to be free. By reworking one of the
most famous artworks of the master of appropriation, Ibrahim com-
ments on the imposition of publicity into everyday life. Media scholar
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun understands publicity as stemming: “from the
breach between seeing and being seen, between representing and being
represented. Publicity is an enabling violence—but not all publicity is
the same. The key is to rethink time and space—and language—in order
to intervene in this public and to understand how this public intervenes
. . . in order to understand how the Internet both perpetuates and alters
publicity” (2006, 126). Ibrahim’s Disturbia considers time, space, and the
language of color, refashioning the battered Rihanna as Warhol’s Marilyn
Diptych, which is arguably one of the most famous publicity-­art images of
the twentieth century. The background colors of the images that comprise
Ibrahim’s work shift from black to orange to white to blue. The individual
portraits use muted pastels that also shift from panel to panel, a possible
citation of the bruises and abrasions documented by the police images
of Rihanna. Disturbia’s shifts in color suggest the passage of time dur-
ing which Rihanna’s physical injuries gradually fade away. Ibrahim makes
color speak, whereas in the police photograph of Rihanna, color can only
remain silent, muted.
The changing colors of Ibrahim’s series evoke the movement of infor-
mation, facilitated by digital technology, from the space of law into the
public domain. In 2002 the New York Times reported the introduction of
digital cameras that would replace the Polaroid technology previously
used by law enforcement to investigate domestic-­violence crimes.9 The re-
port, like Ibrahim’s Disturbia, marvels at the affordances of digital media.

118 Kelli D. Moore
Ibrahim’s vibrant use of color disrupts the status of the police as arbiters
of transparency. The perception of skin trauma is not the central point of
information in Ibrahim’s image; the use of color only suggests the wounds
rendered by the police image. The viewer must also see the original police
image to decode law enforcement’s encoding of the “look” of domestic
violence (see S. Hall 1980). Rihanna’s death mask in Ibrahim’s image re-
turns us to her commodified identity, her celebrity status as a performer,
the organizing concept of the image. In the absence of any text or cap-
tion, the viewer must read the use of color to decode the information in
the image. Ibrahim’s appropriation of both Rihanna’s image and Warhol’s
Marilyn Diptych attunes the viewer to the promiscuity of Rihanna’s image,
oscillating between legal photography and entertainment.

20/20 Visions: Rihanna Speaks Out

In November 2009, nine months after Rihanna was assaulted, Diane

Sawyer interviewed her for 20/20. Rihanna’s appearance on the program
is suggestive of how the visual evidence of domestic abuse continued
to produce multiple narratives about justice across social-­media plat-
forms. The 20/20 interview begins by interspersing moving images of the
beaches of Barbados with childhood portraits of Rihanna. The singer is
shown performing as Diane Sawyer’s voiceover introduces the interview.
At one point, Sawyer asks Rihanna to consider the infamously leaked
image of her face.
Sawyer: The picture taken that night, have you looked at it?
Rihanna: I get very . . . embarrassed. I feel humiliated. I get angry all
over again every time I see it. The whole thing plays back in my
head, so I don’t like to see it.
Sawyer: Why be ashamed? Why would you be ashamed?
Rihanna: I fell in love with that person. That’s embarrassing. That’s em-
barrassing that that’s the type of person that I fell in love with. So
far in love, so unconditional that I went back. It’s humiliating to see
your face like that. It’s humiliating to say that this-­this-­this hap-
pened, to accept that. (Zak 2009)
As an internationally famous performer, Rihanna makes her fortune
through timely, highly manicured, and choreographed rebrandings of her
stage persona, of which this interview is one part. The police photograph
of Rihanna’s battered face also contributes to this branding, even if the

Held in the Light 119

creation and circulation of this image is not under her (or her pr team’s)
control. Police photographs of battered women’s injured faces and bodies
participate in what surveillance-­studies scholar Roger Clarke (1994) calls
the “digital persona,” where electronically collected and stored data ap-
pears as a model of the individual’s identity and behavior. Rihanna’s re-
sponses to Sawyer’s questions disclose how the circulation of the image
led to a humiliating exposure of her digital persona, inseparable from Ri-
hanna’s unique experience of controlling her artistic stage persona. Sig-
nificantly, Rihanna notes how the mere sight of the police image induces
a nightmarish “playback” of the violent encounter with her former lover.
Her appearance on 20/20 attempts to deterritorialize from memory the
image of her abuse.
Cartwright suggests we read “more closely the relational practices of
empathy through a system that allows us to track the qualities and direc-
tions of its movement across texts, subjects and social contexts” (2008,
239). In Rihanna’s case, the assault complaint, labeled the People of the
State of California v. Christopher Brown (ba353571), did not result in a
felony trial. Rihanna’s appearance on 20/20 thus became an extralegal
space in which to adjudicate and redress the violence she experienced
(and experiences again when she encounters the police image). Her ap-
pearance on the program is informed by the “regime of domestic violence
governmentality” and the “analytics of raciality” that regulate feelings
around violence and represent what violence is, or looks like.10 Working
through the shame and humiliation commonly experienced by battered
women, the performer engages the aesthetics of transparency (R. Hall,
this volume) when she offers her story of domestic abuse to the public.
Throughout the 20/20 interview, Rihanna remains seated, wearing
a white turtleneck dress with fur epaulets, nude lipstick, and nude nail
polish. Her hair is stripped of pigment. The ombre coiffure fades from
dark to light and seems an updated version of hairstyles worn by Marilyn
Monroe and Mae West. Sawyer and Rihanna are seated in a darkened
studio, the walls lit blue and hung with red drapes. While Rihanna’s seated
figure provides the white in the “Red, White, and Blue” scene, Sawyer’s
body disappears into the darkened background. Through color, lighting,
framing, and dress, the scene suggests that the United States has incor-
porated the performer’s story of abuse into the national discourse of
intimate-­partner violence.
The makeup and clothing worn by Rihanna on 20/20 are examples of
the aesthetics of transparency (Hall, this volume), which privilege white-

120 Kelli D. Moore
6.3 Screen capture of Rihanna’s interview with Diane Sawyer on 20/20. “Exclusive:
Rihanna Speaks Out,” 9 November 2009, abc News website.

ness. The lighting and the singer’s performance of stillness contribute to

the public process of working through her assault and to the online cir-
culation of documentation of the violence. During the interview, Sawyer
shows Rihanna video footage published online after tmz’s publication of
the police image. A young black man and two young white women are fea-
tured in separate video testimonials, each wondering what Rihanna did to
provoke Brown. In a nonverbal response to these questions, the singer en-
gages the aesthetics of transparency and stillness (Young 2010). Young’s
concept of “phenomenal blackness” captures the resistant visibility Ri-
hanna achieves on 20/20 in the face of disbelief by the public about her
claims of abuse. In Young’s analysis, black athletes and artists at the turn
of the century deployed gestural practices of resistance based on their ex-
periences of racial violence and on a sense of anticipated violence (a vio-
lence to come). Fixed before the 20/20 camera, faced with the public’s
assumption that she provoked Brown, Rihanna preempts the “violence to
come.” The singer’s radiant stillness strains against the inanimate post-
mortem image rendered by the police. Rihanna mimics, through white
clothing and nude cosmetics, the flash photography police use to docu-
ment domestic abuse and the limitations of dark skin for this documen-
tation. Her 20/20 appearance and her static position before the gaze of
the law are brought into conceptual alignment as scenes and strategies

Held in the Light 121

of racial engulfment: Rihanna’s still body, physically subjected to the bio-
political regime of domestic-­abuse adjudication, becomes the visual site
of somatic resistance. In Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the
Shaping of the Modern (2008), Jayna Brown observes how black women
artists who perform negotiate their commodified bodies within racist
entertainment contexts and urban geography. Brown notes that black
women performers express “a deeper awareness of how expressive art-
istry brings into view the staged nature of racialization and the performed
nature of defiant responses to racial [and sexist] discursive claims” (2008,
283). On the 20/20 television broadcast, Rihanna appears “at home every-
where and nowhere . . . [as if her] survival required spontaneity, agility,
and awareness of the political conflicts and currents around [her]” (ibid.,
242). On the Fashion Bomb Daily blog, Claire Sulmers (2009) wrote about
Rihanna’s use of color and sartorial choices as well as the complementary
television lighting, noting that Rihanna’s fashion choices emphasize her
strength: “I, like many other Rihanna fans sat riveted watching her inter-
view with Diane Sawyer on 20/20. Though the incident was quite trau-
matic for her, she seemed strong, resolute, and fierce. What better way
to flaunt her renewed spirit than in Fendi’s $2,200 Fur-­Trim Turtleneck
Sweater Dress?” Rihanna’s engagement of whitening techniques recalls
the racial and gendered valence of categories of goodness, purity, and
innocence traditionally held by white women and accessed through black
women’s sentimental appearances. The police image of Rihanna’s battered
face is fed back to the public on 20/20 through Rihanna’s and the camera’s
rendering of soft, white, feminine elegance.

Conclusion

Through my reading of the police photograph of Rihanna’s physical abuse

and its circulation, I propose we see a moment in which the black female
body is written into, but stands outside juridical universality. Ferreira da
Silva’s analysis of raciality would suggest that photography is a scientific
tool that manufactures knowledge of human racial difference. Whitened
by the camera flash, Rihanna’s appearance exposed more than the prob-
lem of lighting in photography. Taken literally, Rihanna’s entry into the
arena of justice demanded the technical evacuation of her skin color. In
cases of domestic violence, law enforcement’s use of flash photography
recalls the practice of “not-­seeing” discussed by Andrea Smith (this vol-

122 Kelli D. Moore
ume). Not-­seeing is a technique that foregrounds the logic of the white
supremacist heteropatriarchal state and informs subsequent encounters
with racial others. In Smith’s example, the denial of preexisting native
peoples, and of their ways of being, enabled the colonization of lands
and resources that established the United States. 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. Rihanna, as racial other, is held by
the light, cordoned by the flash, existing at the edge of juridical univer-
sality.
It is no irony that the practice of not-­seeing is constitutive of a looking
practice that involves conquest. In this chapter I pursued a critique of the
rationale of law-­enforcement photography by theorizing ways in which
Ibrahim’s Disturbia and Rihanna’s television appearance on 20/20 “talked
back” to the regime of domestic-­violence governmentality. With its use
of color and repetition, Disturbia suggests that iconicity is manufactured
through reason and feeling. Rihanna’s appearance on 20/20 performed an
affective citation of the codes of whiteness and femininity, producing her
as an empathetic witness. Engulfed within the visual codes of whiteness
and femininity, Rihanna embodied Ferreira da Silva’s concerns with “mat-
ters that take place on the other side of universality” (2001, 421). The idea
of race is more than a political-­philosophical thesis of the Enlightenment;
it is a powerful technological strategy of en-­lighten-­ment, producing the
space, both real and virtual, that negotiates which bodies may enter the
domain of justice.

Notes

I would like to thank Rachel E. Dubrofsky for her kind editorial recommendations,
Sherene Razack, and Christina Spiesel for generously reading and commenting on
early iterations of this essay. I would also like to thank the participants of the 2013
Law and Society Conference panel “We Are Not Post-­Racial, Or, the ‘and’ in Law
and Society to Come” for their encouraging engagement with ideas crucial to the
development of this essay.

1. See especially Shearer-­Cremean and Winkelmann 2004, chap. 7. For studies of

how photography of abused women in medicolegal settings influences trauma nar-
ratives, see also Garcia and Suess Kennedy 2003; White and Du Mont 2009.
2. For an analysis of the effects of evidence-­based policies, see Guzik 2009.
3. See also Ewen and Ewen 2006; Fusco and Wallis 2003; Tagg 1993.

Held in the Light 123

 4. Wexler (2000) analyzes at length an image called Nursemaid and Her Charge,
produced between 1865 and 1868 by George Cook of Virginia. For an analysis of
nursemaid clothing, see Severa 1995.
5. See also Wilderson 2010.
6. In the film, Monroe plays Rose Loomis, the adulterous wife of George Loomis,
a military veteran played by the actor Joseph Cotten. Monroe’s character and her
lover, Patrick, played by Richard Allen, plan to murder George. The aftermath of
George’s recent stay at an army mental hospital for “battle fatigue” is a notable
prefiguration of posttraumatic stress disorder and its connection to war culture.
George’s disarray animates the onscreen violence between him and Rose and the
murder plot conceived by Rose and Patrick. See Hathaway 1953.
7. Gardner and Kleiner 2010; Wilson and Tate Gallery 1991.
8. For an analysis of the Technicolor motion-­picture color process, see Brian
Winston’s Technologies of Seeing. Winston offers a critique of the Technicolor pro-
cess as a racist technology.
9. The New York Times reports, “Photographs of bruises or broken furniture, if
taken at all, are usually shot with Polaroid cameras. Those snapshots, which are
often blurry and fail to make the injuries visible, can take days or even weeks to
reach the courts. But with digital photography, evidence that has been practi-
cally impossible to gather quickly or gather at all—clear and detailed images of in-
juries like swollen eyes, bruised cheeks and handprints around the neck—can be
transmitted by computer to prosecutors and judges at the earliest stages of a case”
(Kershaw 2002).
10. On the “regime of domestic violence governmentality,” see Merry 2001;
Merry 2002. On the “analytics of raciality,” see Ferreira da Silva 2001; Ferreira da
Silva 2007.

124 Kelli D. Moore
 PART III

BIOMETRIC TECHNOLOGIES
AS SURVEILLANCE ASSEMBLAGES
 7
TERROR AND THE FEMALE GROTESQUE
Introducing Full-­Body Scanners to U.S. Airports

RACHEL HALL

In response to the threat of international terrorism, the United States has

swiftly and uncritically embraced what I call the aesthetics of transparency
in the post-­9/11 era.1 Broadly, the aesthetics of transparency is motivated
by the desire to turn the world (and the body) inside out such that there
would no longer be secrets or interiors, human or geographical, in which
terrorists or terrorist threats might find refuge. The military and security
state’s objection to interiority is both physical and psychological, referring
as much to the desire to rid the warring world of pockets, caves, spider
holes, and veils as it is concerned with ferreting out all secrets, stopping
at nothing in its effort to produce actionable intelligence from detainees.
The aesthetics of transparency can thus be defined as an attempt by the
security state to force a correspondence between interiority and exteri-
ority on the objects of the preventative gaze or, better yet, to flatten the
object of surveillance, thereby doing away with the problem of correspon-
dence altogether. Circulating within the broader framework of the aesthet-
ics of transparency, opacity effects visualize a body, geography, building,
or institution as possessing an interior, a realm beyond what is visible.
Opacity effects raise suspicion by the mere fact that they dare to present
something that is not entirely visually accessible to the viewer or monitor.
The U.S. security state’s desire to flatten the object of surveillance has
influenced the development and implementation of new surveillance
technologies in the post-­9/11 era. In the United States and other West-
ern nations, where the political leadership feels besieged by the threat
of international terrorism, periodic media spectacles of deadly terrorist
threats remind publics what is at stake if “we” do not adopt and uni-
formly submit to new surveillance technologies. In this manner, spec-
tacles and specters of the terrorist threat nourish a political culture of
compulsory transparency or unquestioning support for technological
solutions to the threat of international terrorism. Media coverage of ene-
mies of the United States in the war on terror and terrorist attacks or near
misses in the “homeland” create a supportive context for the reception of
new surveillance technologies. In this environment, the enemies of the
United States in the war on terror (both iconic and ordinary) serve as the
“opaque” bodies or “bad” examples from which the “transparent” traveler
is encouraged to distinguish her body in domestic visual cultures of ter-
rorism prevention. I do not understand these spectacles of opacity as in-
tentional efforts on the part of media corporations to serve as agents of
propaganda for the U.S. military or security state. Rather, I suggest that
some military, government, and media professionals share an aesthetic
orientation, which implies a global politics of mobility.
In the post-­9/11 era, colonial binarism is subtly recast. Instead of “the
West and the Rest,” domestic-­security cultures of terrorism prevention in-
vest tremendous energy and resources into producing docile global citizen-­
suspects who willingly become “transparent” or turn themselves inside
out, such that they are readily and visibly distinct from the “opaque” ene-
mies of the United States in the theaters of the war on terror. As Yasmin
Jiwani observes (this volume), when bodies are recast as borders, the in-
visibility of unmarked or “transparent” bodies operate in relation to the
hypervisibility of nominated or profiled bodies. According to the aesthetics
of transparency animating these distant yet interdependent security cul-
tures, it is the production of particular bodies as stubbornly opaque which
justifies violent practices of torture and interrogation, and abandons them
to the necropolitics of indefinite detention (Mdembe 2003). By contrast,
the docile citizen-­suspect’s presumed ability to participate in the project of
biopolitics by affirming life in line with the conventions set by the U.S. secu-
rity state makes physical violence against his or her body both unnecessary
and unacceptable. Docile citizen-­suspects are presumed capable of prac-
ticing what Nikolas Rose (1999) and Mitchell Dean (2009), among others,
call “reflexive governance.” The term refers to the ways in which neoliberal

128 Rachel Hall
strategies of governance “offload” risk management and homeland defense
onto citizens (Andrejevic 2006b). In post-­9/11 cultures of terrorism pre-
vention, reflexive governance refers to the citizen’s “voluntary” transpar-
ency or her demonstration of readiness-­for-­inspection. I place voluntary in
quotes to signal the coercive aspects of a performance demanded by the
security state for the passenger to be permitted to board his or her flight.

Animal Opacity

Elsewhere I argue that two Western media images from the war on terror
offer a particularly poignant example of how photography may be used
to produce opacity effects: a photograph of Saddam Hussein’s spider hole
(a very small subterranean hideout), taken from above, looking down
into the darkness; and the image of his medical examination, featuring
the dark cavity of his mouth being pried open by a U.S. military inspec-
tor (R. Hall 2007). Analysis of the latter image establishes how Hussein
and other spectacular models of “stubborn” opacity hail docile citizen-­
suspects to “voluntarily” perform transparency within the domestic-­
security cultures of terrorism prevention. In the visual cultures of the
war on terror, opacity effects are racialized via photographic depictions of
skin tone, hair, and head coverings. As Kellie D. Moore argues (this vol-
ume), any skin tone other than the whitest of white threatens to obscure
the truth sought via the surveillant gaze.
For the privileged Western spectators of the war on terror, war-
time surveillance provides discipline and entertainment, or better yet,
discipline-­as-­entertainment. Consider cnn’s online special report “Sad-
dam Hussein: Captured.” The site offers an interactive reenactment of
Hussein’s capture.2 Hussein is figured as the stubborn, misbehaving out-
law who must be physically and forcibly subdued. The scene of capture is
akin to a scene from an early reality-­t v program like Cops or some other
true-­crime show. The “money shot” of this genre features cops violently
subduing animalized suspects. Such programs rehearse the drama of a
predictable power dynamic between individuals coded as inferior based
on their race, class, and lack of education, and the rational cops, who
know how to “handle” them.
While we don’t get to see Saddam Hussein taken down, the images and
video of his medical exam accomplish a similar spectacle of dominance
and submission. In the image of his medical inspection, U.S. soldiers con-
firm the identity and reality of his body by demonstrating its depth and

Terror and the Female Grotesque 129

7.1 Captured former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein undergoes medical examinations
in Baghdad in this 14 December 2003 file photo (image from television). Associated
Press file photo/U.S. Military via aptn.

penetrating the surface. “We” get to see the dark cavity of his mouth and
extreme close-­ups of his teeth. The medicalization of this encounter sig-
nifies Hussein’s physical submission to U.S. authority, connotes his ani-
mality, and—to the Eurocentric viewer—may suggest a benign version
of U.S. imperialism, which has science, medicine, and the Enlightenment
on its side. This painstakingly documented and widely circulated medical
exam rehearses what Robert Stam and Ella Shohat have called the “ani-
malizing trope” of empire or “the discursive figure by which the coloniz-
ing imaginary rendered the colonized beastlike and animalic” (1994, 19).
This medical scene is reminiscent of the spectacular examination of slaves
on the auction block. In drawing this comparison, I am not trying to be
provocative, but rather insisting that the animalizing trope of empire is a
racist strategy of dehumanization.
In the context of post-­9/11 security cultures like those in U.S. airports,
screening a passenger using high-­tech surveillance technologies is one of
the ways in which her difference from the animalized suspects in the war
on terror in the United States is symbolically performed and reinforced.

130 Rachel Hall
Ironically, surveillance technologies first tested on incarcerated popu-
lations are now also capable of producing distinction from incarcerated
populations when used to securitize the privileged mobility of air passen-
gers. Shoshana Amielle Magnet (2011) has demonstrated how surveillance
technologies play a role in managing incarcerated populations. The un-
stated presumption of the United States that technology is on “our” side
(of those waging war on terror) subtly exerts pressure on suspects in the
security cultures of terrorism prevention to submit to screening by these
technologies, and to do so in a manner demonstrating that they are also
on the side of the technology and of those waging war on terror. As Jas-
bir Puar has argued, “Pivotal here is the notion of capacity, in other words
the ability to thrive within and propagate the biopolitics of life by project-
ing potential as futurity, one indication of which is performed through the
very submission to these technologies of surveillance that generate these
data” (2007, 200). Passengers perform transparency as willing submission
to the scanner machines or else they suffer the indignities of a publicly
staged physical inspection of their bodies by another human being. It
is these charged distinctions, between machine and human, vision and
touch, which enable the citizens of the United States and other Western
nations to recognize themselves as fundamentally different from and
somehow more innocent than the ordinary Iraqis, Afghanis, and other
non-­Westerners subjected to detention, torture, and abuse (in many cases
without probable cause) in the name of the war on terror.
By contrast to the spectacular and ordinary enemies of the United
States in the war on terror, the docile passenger-­suspects moving through
domestic-­security cultures are presumed to be self-­subduing. The air pas-
senger need only wait to be told what to do, proceed calmly toward the
machine, wait her turn, step on the footprints, raise her hands above her
head, and freeze until she is told she is free to go. The passenger’s “vol-
untary” participation in the biopolitical project of terrorism prevention
is also, then, a more or less convincing performance of whiteness, where
whiteness is conceptualized not in an essentialized biological sense but as
a “racialized technology of power,” as Jiwani (this volume) puts it. Other
feminists have forcefully articulated the racial dimension of biopolitics.
Citing Rey Chow’s assertion that biopolitics is implicitly about the ascen-
dancy of whiteness, Puar writes, “The terms of whiteness cannot remain
solely in the realm of racial identification or phenotype but extend out to
the capacity for capacity: that is, the capacity to give life, sustain life, pro-
mote life—the registers of fertility, health, environmental sustainability,

Terror and the Female Grotesque 131

and the capacity to risk” (2007, 200). In the context of post-­9/11 security
cultures of terrorism prevention, the capacity to risk and to have one’s risky
ventures securitized is a marker of whiteness in this broader sense. I name
this racialized, securitized capacity to risk “transparency chic.” An index
of the First World traveler’s “privileged paranoia,” or her desire to reap the
rewards of mobility while avoiding the risks, transparency chic takes the
form of a willingness to open the live body, its accoutrements and posses-
sions, as well as its digital double, to routine inspection and analysis.3
Transparency chic also works the other way: the passenger’s perfor-
mance of voluntary transparency lends the surveillance technologies in
question an air of transparency. The passenger’s public performance of
submitting to these machines supports the notion that airport security
screening is an innocent, impersonal, and objective process. Security offi-
cials borrow the myths of nonintervention and total transparency used to
support no-­touch security solutions from the visual culture of medicine.
José Van Dijk identifies the assumptions underlying these rationales: “The
myth of total transparency generally rests on two underlying assumptions:
the idea that seeing is curing and the idea that peering into the body is an
innocent activity, which has no consequences” (2005, 7–8). Despite insis-
tence by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (tsa) that visual
technologies for scanning the body render human contact between tsa
screeners and passengers unnecessary, these technologies serve a hybrid
method of surveillance, which combines vision with touch. As Lisa Parks
first observed, technological mediation serves as a precursor to and justifi-
cation for human contact in the case of haptic vision: “What distinguishes
close sensing from other forms of surveillance is the authority the state
has granted to supplement vision with touch” (2007, 190). Parks notes
that tsa guidelines stipulate that human screeners must scan any body or
belonging by machine before they handle it (ibid.). Touch is thus defined
as human-­to-­human contact and does not include human-­to-­machine
contact. The threat of physical search rationalizes each new technological
solution and energizes passenger performances of voluntary transparency
staged as encounters between humans and machines.

Transparency Chic

The pressure to perform voluntary transparency via submission to screen-

ing by the new surveillance technologies demands, in turn, what Robert
McRuer (2006) named “compulsory able-­bodiedness.” McRuer demon-

132 Rachel Hall
strates the interrelation between what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory
heterosexuality” and compulsory able-­bodiedness. His analysis of vari-
ous popular-­culture texts also demonstrates how the cultural ideals of
heterosexuality and able-­bodiedness are further inflected by normative
ideals regarding body types, beauty, and health. In post-­9/11 security cul-
tures, approximating the state’s idea of what passes for normal becomes
a matter of national security. In this context, if you fear humiliation and
judgment at the checkpoint because your body does not approximate the
cultural ideal, that has nothing to do with the technology’s prying eyes,
rather, it is your fault: your failure to master the body project leaves you
at risk of humiliation.
Full-­body scanners, which were rapidly installed in airports across the
United States and beyond in response to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s
failed attempt to down Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit
on 25 December 2009, examine the rough outlines of the passenger’s ana-
tomical form in order to identify “objects against bodies” or “forms that
aren’t traditionally part of the human physique” (Sachs 2010). Of note here
is the telling use of the term traditional to describe “the human physique”
(in the singular). Like whiteness or heterosexuality, transparency claims
the ground of neutrality, while in fact the transparent body desired by
the security state is not neutral but, more accurately, normate, the term
Rosmarie Garland Thompson (1996) has used to refer to what is under-
stood as the generalizable human being or the body type thought to be
normal. In the context of post-­9/11 security cultures, the appearance of
normalcy takes on the characteristics of transparency, defined as that
which we do not see or notice, as opposed to those signs of bodily differ-
ence from the norm, which register visually in the form of stigmata. Mag-
net (2011) makes a similar argument regarding how the outsourcing of the
U.S. border externalizes the threat of terrorism and inscribes it on othered
bodies and bodies that reside outside the nation. The white body is nor-
malized and serves as a standard against which others will be judged (Ji-
wani, this volume). And as Moore’s analysis of Ibrahim’s appropriation art
and Rihanna’s appearance on abc’s 20/20 demonstrates, “the transparent
aesthetics practiced by law enforcement operate through an association
between objectivity and whiteness” (this volume, 116). Built into the aes-
thetics of transparency as it is currently mobilized by the U.S. security state
is the desire for a generalizable body type which can be easily recognized
as innocent or nonthreatening and thus efficiently be “cleared” for takeoff.
Consider a graphic entitled “Technology that Might Have Helped,”

Terror and the Female Grotesque 133

7.2 New York Times graphic depicting body images produced by x-­ray backscatter and
millimeter wave screening technologies. New York Times, “Technology That Might
Have Helped,” 27 December 2009 (www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/27/us
/terror-­graphic.html).

published by the New York Times two days after Abdulmutallab’s failed
bombing of Flight 253.4 The graphic pictures the images produced by x-­ray
backscatter and millimeter-­wave screening machines, respectively. In
addition to showing readers the difference between the images produced
by the two types of technology, the New York Times describes the differ-
ences in terms of visual technologies with which the reader is already
familiar. The image produced by backscatter machines “resembles a chalk
etching,” whereas the image produced by the millimeter-­wave machines
“resembles a fuzzy photo negative.”
It could also be said that the elongated head and spindly fingers on
the backscatter image resemble a humanoid alien from a midcentury
science-­fiction film, while the sleek metallic perfection of the figure in
the millimeter-­wave image is reminiscent of the star robot in Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis. Note that both of the sample body images on display appear
hollow, flat, futuristic, slender, fit, relatively young, and able-­bodied—
not to mention the fact that the images picture all bodies, regardless of
skin tone, as fuzzy white or metallic silver outlines.
Media discourses about full-­body scanners domesticate them by ref-
erence to the norms of U.S. popular and consumer cultures, which cele-
brate Euro-­American standards of beauty, health, and fitness. Conse-
quently, the transparent traveler is defined via her ability to discipline

134 Rachel Hall
the grotesquely opaque body, whose abjection communicates the per-
petual threat that the docile passenger-­suspect’s body will somehow fail
to perform transparency up to code. Consider a cheeky, flirtatious piece
of gonzo journalism entitled “Reporter Faces the Naked Truth about Full-­
Body Airport Scanners” (2010), for which Andrea Sachs of the Washing-
ton Post underwent a full-­body scan by a millimeter-­wave machine so she
might “experience the technology’s prying eyes first hand.” Rather than
report information regarding what firms would profit from the tech-
nology’s adoption or raise questions regarding its use, the reporter mod-
eled for the reader how to make the adjustment to a new layer of security.
The article’s tone oscillates between sexual teasing and self-­punishing
narcissism. Sachs stresses the threat of being found unattractive in the
images produced by the new machines. The experience of having one’s
clothes virtually peeled away by the new scanner is articulated in terms of
vanity and sexual attractiveness or (gasp) repulsion, rather than as a pro-
cess that renders each body suspect. There is no tucking or lifting or suck-
ing in of guts that the tsa cannot see through with the new machines.
Even as Sachs worries about what she considers to be her major cor-
poreal flaw (a belly button placed too high on her torso), she mock scolds
herself to put vanity aside for the sake of homeland security: “Get over
yourself, honey: The full-­body scanning machines at airport security
checkpoints weren’t created to point out corporeal flaws but to detect
suspicious objects lurking beneath airline passengers’ clothing.” Sachs’s
“get over yourself,” comment is meant to reassure passengers that when
scanned, the body becomes nothing more than a medium or environment,
but it also presumes the passenger’s feminine vanity and irrelevance. What
the feminist philosopher Mary Russo conceptualizes as the “female gro-
tesque”—that cavernous figure associated “in the most gross metaphori-
cal sense” with the female anatomical body—circulates here as a comic
foil to the opaque terrorist. As Russo has written, the word “grotesque
evokes the cave—the grotto-­esque. Low, hidden, earthly, dark, material,
immanent, visceral. As bodily metaphor, the grotesque cave tends to look
like (and in the most gross metaphorical sense be identified with) the cav-
ernous anatomical female body” (1994, 1–2). While the enemy’s stubborn
opacity rationalizes physical penetration and punishment of his body in
the theaters of the war on terror, the mock vanity of the female grotesque
reduces serious critique of the full-­body scanners to a self-­deprecating
joke. In the end, Sachs tells the reader that the security expert conducting
her scan eventually erased the image, but it stuck with her. She ends the

Terror and the Female Grotesque 135

article by expressing her support for the new technology, given the very
real threats to America’s safety posed by terrorism. “In the end,” Sachs
(2010) writes, “I found it comforting to know that the body scanner would
uncover items missed by older equipment and that we travelers have one
more layer of protection against those exceedingly crafty terrorists.”
There is a politics to feeling afraid of another “crafty” terrorist attack
and comforted by the installation of full-­body scanners at U.S. airports.
In the context of airport security, performing voluntary transparency is
coded as “hip” in the postfeminist spirit of agency and empowerment via
preparation of the body in anticipation of the male gaze. Because the new
norms of airport security culture borrow from the norms of U.S. consumer
culture, they presume a passenger who sees “her” body as a project. In
their essay on how celebrity white women tweet and how those tweets are
read on gossip sites, Dubrofsky and Wood (this volume) update Mulvey’s
theory of the male gaze for the postfeminist digital era, arguing that the
recipient of the gaze is a participant in creating the image on display and
actively fashions the body for consumption. They point out that it is only
white women celebrities who are granted agency in the form of produc-
ing their bodies for the male gaze. Famous women of color are regularly
discussed, critiqued, and celebrated on gossip sites, but their bodies are
consistently treated as “natural” and therefore beyond their control. The
bodies of famous white women, however, are depicted as ongoing projects
or life works, of which those white celebrities can be proud because of the
effort they have put into producing their bodies as attractive by the stan-
dards of the male gaze. Building on these keen insights, I argue that in
the context of airport security the “good” passenger-­suspect operates ac-
cording to a gendered model of reflexive governance, which defines itself
in opposition to the female grotesque. In short, the “good” passenger acts
like a vain white woman from the United States who is always ready for
sex. Indirectly, then, the “good” passenger’s take on the new surveillance
technologies constructs the terrorist threat by reference to the figure of
the female grotesque, the woman who fails to prepare her body for the
male gaze, or the woman who refuses male sexual advances.
Ultimately, Sachs models feminine heterosexual acquiescence to the
new surveillance technologies. This framing of the new surveillance tech-
nologies resonates with a romantic view of the security state as the terri-
fied passenger’s knight in shining armor and finds its precursor in Ameri-
can comic books and films featuring a lusty, muscle-bound superhero with
x-ray vision. Consider the following iconic scene from the 1973 film adap-

136 Rachel Hall
tation of Superman: on a balmy night in Metropolis, Lois Lane interviews
Superman on her terrace. She wears a billowy, flowing white gown and
cape (you know what he’s got on). As Lois questions Superman about his
special powers, she learns that he has x-ray vision but cannot see through
lead. “What color underwear am I wearing?,” the inquisitive reporter asks
frankly. A lead planter stands between them. His response is delayed, so
Lois moves on to other probing questions. It is not until later, when she
steps out from behind the planter, that he answers her. “Pink,” he says
flatly, chastely. “What?,” she asks, looking confused. “They’re pink, Lois.”
She turns to him for clarification and finds him staring at her crotch.
“Oh,” she nods in understanding and blushes slightly. A few minutes later,
as they are flying over the city together, Lois continues her interview with
Superman in her head, posing additional questions in a whispery, child-
like voice full of wonder: “Can you read my mind?”
In this romantic sequence from Superman (1973), acts of seeing and
showing-­through double as sex acts for the human-­superhero couple,
expressing the romantic longing for a super man capable of recognizing
and potentially fulfilling feminine desires. Superman’s ability to literally
see through Lois’s evening gown extends, metaphorically to his magical
capacity to read her mind. In the terms of 1970s popular psychology, his
x-­ray vision is not only a superpower but also a metaphor for true love or
what it means to be “in sync” with another person. The superhero’s x-­ray
vision produces pleasure for the intrepid reporter who secretly wears
pink underwear. The experience of being “seen through” feminizes Lois,
temporarily softening the tough-­as-­nails city reporter. At the end of the
flight scene, Superman drops Lois off on her terrace, leaving her in what
appears to be a blissful, postcoital trance so he can return to the thank-
less work of fighting crime.
Lest you think I am making too much of one silly article, Sachs’s mod-
eling of feminine heterosexual acquiescence to the new surveillance
technologies is representative of many more stories, photographs, and
political cartoons that also rely on gendered and sexualized scripts of en-
counters between passenger-­suspects, on the one hand, and surveillance
technologies or representatives of the security state, on the other. One
can see this media narrative neatly encapsulated in the 6 December 2010
cover image of the New Yorker, which upends the romantic formula of
Superman by reversing gender roles to comic effect.
In so doing, influential U.S. media outlets like the Washington Post and
the New Yorker participate in and promote what Magnet has called “sur-

Terror and the Female Grotesque 137

 7.3 “Feeling the Love,”
by Barry Blitt. Cover art
for the New Yorker,
6 December 2010.

veillant scopophilia,” which refers to the ways in which new surveillance

technologies produce “new forms of pleasure [for some] in looking at
the human body disassembled into its component parts while simulta-
neously working to assuage individual anxieties about safety and security
through the promise of surveillance” (2011, 17). This selective treatment
aligns the new technologies with U.S. consumer and popular cultures of
surveillance, where sex and sex appeal (or the tragic lack thereof ) are the
only story being told. The “sexy” or comically asexual exposed body is uni-
formly white. In this manner, the sexualization of the new surveillance
technologies in U.S. discourse domesticates the machines while obscur-
ing the global racial norm used to determine which bodies are presumed
capable of reflexive governance via high-­tech screening and which bodies
are presumed incapable or unwilling to practice reflexive governance and
must therefore be forcibly subdued.

Female Grotesque

The coding of “voluntary” transparency as hip in a postfeminist sense is

based, in turn, on a gendered and sexualized construction of the terror-
ist threat addressed by the new surveillance technologies. In its cover-
age of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s nearly successful attack on North-

138 Rachel Hall
west Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on 25 December 2009, abc
News depicted the would-­be terrorist as a grossly undisciplined woman.
The news organization posted government photographs of the accused
bomber’s underwear (Esposito and Ross 2009). In the photos, the sus-
pect’s briefs have been turned inside out to reveal a packet of explosive
powder sewn into the crotch. The garment figures the terrorist’s opacity
in the visual and linguistic registers of failed feminine hygiene.
When I first saw the underwear photos, I wondered whether Al Qaeda
wasn’t intentionally crafting a brilliant, interactive durational perfor-
mance art piece spoofing the deepest, darkest recesses of the American
psyche. The article refers to the suspect’s “underpants”—a garment worn
by women and children in the United States. As a woman, it is difficult not
to see a resemblance between Abdulmutallab’s underwear kitted out with
a secret, explosive compartment and a pair of women’s underwear outfit-
ted with a maxi pad or panty liner. The tattered, torn, and stained under-
wear connotes the shame of soiling oneself and arouses in the viewer the
fear of losing physical control over the body and the nightmare of being
publicly exposed in a compromised state. The photos call to mind the old
parental admonishment to “make sure you have on clean underwear in
case you’re in an accident.” The public shaming was reprised in the fall of
2012 when Lee Ferran of abc News reported that the bomb failed to deto-
nate because Abdulmutallab’s underwear was dirty. Abdulmutallab’s race
is not marked explicitly, and his body remains out of frame, but it is the
articulation of orientalism and the female grotesque, in this case, which
implicitly demands and condones his public emasculation.
In addition to depicting Abdulmutallab within the visual codes of
failed female hygiene, the “underpants” exhibit also queers the terrorist.
As Puar has observed, “The depictions of masculinity most rapidly dis-
seminated and globalized at this historical juncture are terrorist mascu-
linities: failed and perverse, these emasculated bodies always have femi-
ninity as their reference point of malfunction, and are metonymically
tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body—homosexuality,
incest, pedophilia, madness, and disease” (2007, xxiii). We can recognize
this pattern of visual representation in the underwear exhibit. The not-­
so-­subtle final shot in the series displays only the explosive packet. The
article explains, “Tragedy was averted only because the detonator, acid in
a syringe, did not work” (Esposito and Ross 2009). The photo displays the
packet lengthwise next to the tape measure, with the explanation that
“all photos include a ruler to provide scale” (ibid.). Earlier in the article

Terror and the Female Grotesque 139

7.4 Forensic government photos of Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear with ex-
plosive powder packet. In Richard Esposito and Brian Ross, “Exclusive: Photos of
the Northwest Airlines Flight 253 Bomb,” 28 December 2009, abc News website.
the authors reported, “The bomb packet is a six-­inch long container” of
the highly explosive chemical, “less than a half cup in volume, weighing
about 80 grams” (ibid.). The final shot queers the aspiring terrorist by in-
directly referencing his willingness to tuck his penis between his legs in
order to make room for a substitute phallus.
One cannot help but be struck by the sober tone of the underwear ex-
hibit, which documents a deliberate process in which select government
officials displayed, lit, and shot the underwear and the explosive packet,
first together, then separately. The forensic authority visually communi-
cated by the exhibit connotes the would-­be terrorist’s abject degradation
in the face of that authority. In the photographs, the underwear appears
to have been ripped or cut off of Abdulmutallab’s body, and in the second
photo, the explosive packet has been removed, exposing a hole burned
through the crotch of the underwear. Ostensibly, the hole communicates
the irrational extremism of a person who would strap a bomb to his body,
but it may also signify the threat of penetration—a threat that extends
beyond Abdulmutallab’s individual body to the bodies of all suspects of
the United States in the war on terror. As Jeremy Packer first observed,
“Citizens become bombs, not simply by choice or through cell propaganda
and training, but by Homeland Security itself” (2006, 381). Abdulmutal-
lab’s failed attempt to become a bomb extends outward to all air passen-
gers, who are treated as potentially explosive until they voluntarily sub-
mit to be scanned by surveillance technologies and/or patted down by
security officials.
The underwear exhibit offers an over-­the-­top example of the moral-
izing function of opacity effects. The implicit comparisons invited by the
exhibition hail the U.S. media consumer to perform “good” global citi-
zenship, which is imagined, in comparison to the terrorist grotesque, as
less voluminous, “dank,” and “dirty.” The underwear exhibit presumes the
media consumer’s difference from and moral superiority to the “opaque”
body on display. By portraying the would-­be terrorist according to the
conventions of the female grotesque, the underwear exhibit implicitly in-
vites U.S. and other Western media consumers to distinguish themselves
from this contemptuous figure by rendering their own bodies less grotto-­
esque. Russo (1994) argues that modern discourses of risk rely on the
conceptualization of women in spatial terms via two figures: the aerial
sublime and the female grotesque. The aerial sublime symbolizes tran-
scendence, technological progress, and futuristic aspiration, but her sym-
bolic work relies on the female grotesque, who embodies the outer (as

Terror and the Female Grotesque 141

inner) limits of the project of modernity and the risk of its catastrophic
failure. Indeed, the full-­body scanners proposed as a solution to the threat
of plastic explosives like the underwear bomb promise to “clear” passen-
gers of suspicion by rendering transparent images of their bodies, which
appear as flat, hollow, unadorned, or otherwise unmodified outlines.
Another New Yorker cartoon, from the 18 January 2010 issue, explores
the threat of humiliation posed by whole-­body scanners. In the cartoon
the passenger suffers not only the humiliation of bodily exposure but
also the embarrassment of having a comforting travel companion revealed.
The passenger, a grown man, has a teddy bear hidden beneath his clothing
and strapped to his waist. Instead of tsa agents viewing his body image in
a closed, offsite location, as they do in actual practice, the cartoon agency
projects life-­size full-­body images of the passenger onto the wall of the
airport just to the side of the checkpoint, where passengers waiting to be
screened laugh and point at the unlikely revelation. While the passenger’s
live body is drawn straight and narrow, with the slim hips of a man, his
security image is drawn in the pear shape that is fatphobically associated
with the female grotesque in U.S. popular culture. The security image func-
tions like a funhouse mirror. The question is whether the distortion is sup-
posed to read as a projection of the passenger’s body dysmorphic disorder
or as a critique of the security state’s filters, which threaten to feminize
and infantilize the passenger, according to this ­cartoon.
In practice, full-­body scanners may unnecessarily expose a medical
condition such as a disability or a colostomy bag, rather than a teddy bear.
As feminist scholars Magnet and Tara Rodgers argue, the body scanners
may create terror and dread for passengers, “especially if these technolo-
gies ‘out’ individuals in their communities, violate their religious beliefs,
or single them out for public humiliation, stress, and harassment” (2012,
13). The authors make a compelling case that these new surveillance tech-
nologies disproportionately affect “Othered bodies, including the inter-
sections of transgendered, disabled, fat, religious, female and racialized
bodies” (ibid., 14). The New Yorker cartoon alludes to the threat of public
humiliation but domesticates that threat via the figure of the ordinary
white male traveler who fails to be hip or sexy while proceeding through
the checkpoint. He becomes the sympathetic, comic foil to the ideal of
transparency chic, someone with whom ordinary readers are encouraged
to identify, rather than with those othered bodies for whom the stakes of
exposure via full-­body scans run much higher.
Transparency chic presumes a healthy, able-­bodied passenger-­suspect.

142 Rachel Hall
7.5 Artwork in the New Yorker, 18 January 2010, p. 47. © Michael Crawford/The
New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank.
Physical ailments, disabilities, limitations, or chronic medical conditions
may prevent a particular suspect from being adequately self-­subduing via
the performance of submission to scanning by machine. This state of af-
fairs requires the tsa officers to substitute or supplement technological
mediation with a physical search. For example, a passenger who relies on
a mobility device cannot assume the proper position required for screen-
ing by the full-­body scanners: standing with arms above head. This per-
son fails to perform transparency insofar as she is unable to assume the
required position and produce the correct gestures in a performance that
would culminate in the production of a particular type of security image
of her body. Likewise, cyborg passengers with implanted defibrillators
cannot pass through metal detectors because their devices set off the de-
tector and therefore defeat the purpose of this method of scanning the
passenger for contraband. Paradoxically, the medical cyborg is at once
too vulnerable and too advanced for the metal detector. The tsa refers to
his condition in visual terms that cast further suspicion on the passenger
with a “hidden disability.”
Where metal detectors and body scanners prove insufficient, tsa
workers must substitute or supplement technological mediation with
physical contact. Transparent mediation by close-­sensing technologies
becomes a semi-­public, intimate physical encounter with a tsa official.
Physical pat-­downs and searches performed on such passengers typically
happen in a designated area just to the side of the queues for the metal
detectors and x-­ray machines. Interestingly, these areas are frequently
cordoned off by a series of glass or plastic partitions. This creates a situa-
tion in which passengers proceeding through the regular screening pro-
cess can watch as tsa officials handle passengers pulled for additional
screening. The function of the transparent partitions communicates vol-
untary transparency on the part of the tsa, even as it heightens the the-
atrical aspects of the encounter, now enticingly framed by a glass box.
Sometimes these inspections go horribly wrong, as in the case of
Thomas Sawyer, a sixty-­one-­year-­old man and cancer survivor, who said
a tsa pat-­down inspection broke his urine bag. Anne E. Kornblut and
Perry Bacon Jr. (2010) of the Washington Post reported that Sawyer suf-
fered the further indignity of having to board his flight covered in urine
without the benefit of an apology from the tsa officer involved in the
incident. Sawyer’s experience (and that of countless others who have
been subjected to a physical search because of a medical condition or dis-
ability) raises the question of whether or not physical pat-­downs consti-
tute a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability

144 Rachel Hall
Act of 1996 (hipaa) or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The
Department of Health and Human Services lists law-­enforcement agen-
cies among those organizations not required to follow hipaa’s privacy
and security rules.5 During a national or public-­health emergency, the
secretary of Health and Human Services may waive certain provisions of
hipaa even for those organizations usually required to follow its privacy
and security rules. Thus, it seems that public physical inspection of pas-
sengers with medical conditions does not constitute a violation of hipaa.
Whether or not public pat-­downs of passengers with medical condi-
tions and disabilities constitutes a violation of the Americans with Dis-
abilities Act is more difficult to determine. The act “prohibits discrimina-
tion on the basis of disability in employment, State and local government,
public accommodations, commercial facilities, transportation, and tele-
communications.”6 The tsa proclaims that its commitment to customer
service extends to all passengers, “regardless of their personal situations
and needs.” In an effort to meet the needs of passengers with medical
conditions and disabilities, the agency established a coalition of over
seventy disability-­related groups and organizations “to help us under-
stand the concerns of persons with disabilities and medical conditions.”7
This research has informed the tsa’s approach to passengers with “all
categories of disabilities (mobility, hearing, visual, and hidden).”8 Cover-
age by the program indicates that tsa screeners have been briefed on the
range of conditions they may encounter. Coverage also means specialized
travel tips for passengers with medical conditions or disabilities and their
traveling companions. The general theme of these disability-­specific tips
is that passengers with medical conditions or disabilities and their travel-
ing companions are responsible for initiating communication about their
condition with tsa officers.
In some cases, the travel tips offered attempt to head off charges of pri-
vacy violation and discrimination in one fell swoop. For example, those
who dislike the exposure of a pat-­down inspection at the checkpoint are ad-
vised to “request a private area for your pat-­down inspection if you feel un-
comfortable with having a medical device being displayed while inspected
by the Security Officer.”9 In the case of passengers with medical conditions
or disabilities, offsite inspection is offered as an option less stigmatizing
than undergoing physical inspection at the checkpoint before an audience
of one’s peers. By contrast, the prospect of being transferred from the pub-
lic checkpoint to an offsite location for further inspection and interroga-
tion implies the threat of physical harm and arrest to those suspected of
terrorism. That is not to say that passengers with medical conditions or

Terror and the Female Grotesque 145

disabilities are presumed innocent. In what is perhaps the most harrowing
section of advice for passengers with medical conditions and disabilities,
the tsa addresses the visual problem of dressed wounds.
• Whenever there is a metal detector alarm in the area of a dressing,
the Security Officers will conduct a gentle limited pat-­down of the
dressing area over top of your clothing.
• Clothing will not be required to be removed, lifted, or lowered dur-
ing the pat-­down inspection.
• The Security Officer will not ask you to, nor will he or she, remove a
dressing during the screening process.
• In the event a Security Officer is not able to determine that a dress-
ing is free of prohibited items via a pat-­down, you will be denied ac-
cess to the sterile area.
Particularly striking is the use of the term sterile in reference to the se-
curitized area just beyond the checkpoint in the context of a discussion of
how to treat passengers with dressed wounds. The final bullet point pits
the “sterility” of the securitized zone against the “sterility” of the pas-
senger’s dressed wound. One form of sterility demands exposure, while
the other requires a protective covering. In its treatment of the range
of medical conditions and disabilities tsa officers may encounter, the
agency’s tone is alternately insistent and tender as it communicates its
unwavering commitment to expose what might otherwise be hidden by
the pretense of a medical condition or disability.
Given the hypersexualized media narratives surrounding the rapid in-
stallation of full-­body scanners in U.S. airports beginning in early 2010, it
is perhaps not all that surprising that the main objection given voice by
major U.S. media outlets concerned the protection of passengers’ sexual
privacy. This was true despite the fact that the new technologies also
raised concerns about radiation exposure from the backscatter machines
(see J. Marshall 2010).10 In response to the charge that the new machines
violated sexual privacy, the tsa stressed that the security images pro-
duced could not be saved or stored. In order for the next passenger to
be scanned, the previous image had to be deleted. James Ott (2010) of
Aviation Daily reported that the tsa chief John Pistole assured the public
that no mobile phones or cameras were permitted in the remote viewing
rooms where agents inspected the full-­body images. In other words, the
tsa understands the privacy violation in terms of the politics of informa-
tion rather than the politics of performing submission to comprehensive

146 Rachel Hall
surveillance, or understands it in terms of the live experience of being
produced as one of the security state’s many suspects.
The tsa stresses the measures it takes to de-­eroticize the body images
it makes. The organization notes that faces are blurred or blocked out,
no hair is visible, and human monitors are of the same sex as the pas-
sengers being screened (the tsa appeals to this same heteronormative
logic when it describes and defends its organizational procedures for con-
ducting physical pat-­downs). In the tsa’s arguments for why these images
are not pornographic, we learn by negation what is sexualized: faces, hair,
and heterosexuality. And in early 2011 Ashley Halsey III, of the Washington
Post, reported that the tsa had debuted a software patch on millimeter-­
wave machines at Las Vegas Airport. The full-­body scanner machines using
radio waves now produce a gray “cookie-­cutter” outline of the human body.
The generic quality of the figure is designed to alleviate privacy concerns
because every body image generated by the machine looks exactly the
same. The lack of graphic detail serves as a control on the potential eroti-
cism of full-­body images. This is a body image designed to do nothing for
the spectator—nothing, that is, other than sanitize the technology and,
by extension, the security state’s relationship to passengers’ bodies.
The automatic detection software highlights suspicious regions with
a yellow box on that part of the generic body. This cues the tsa officer
to physically inspect only that region of the passenger’s body. Signifi-
cantly, the generic body image appears on a screen attached to the scan-
ning booth so that both the tsa officer stationed beside the machine
and the passenger are able to look at the image together and wait for the
green light or “ok,” at which point the tsa officer waves the passenger
on her way. In January 2013 the tsa announced it would be removing all
backscatter machines from U.S. airports, not due to health concerns but
because the machines’ manufacturer, Rapsican, had failed to develop a
software patch to translate detailed images of passengers’ bodies into a
generic outline of the human form.11 The aesthetic produced by the pri-
vacy software patch is of a generic outline, defended on the grounds that
it does not offend privacy. However, the image is revealing in that it pic-
tures precisely what these technologies produce: a new normate body.

Conclusion

My critique of the full-­body scanners contributes to the larger, collabora-

tive project initiated by feminist scholars of surveillance: to shift critical

Terror and the Female Grotesque 147

surveillance studies away from matters of privacy, security, and efficiency
to a consideration of the ethical problem of combating new forms of dis-
crimination that are practiced in relation to categories of privilege, access,
and risk.12 U.S. public discourse has domesticated the new surveillance
technology via gendered and sexualizing scripts of being seen-­through
as a form of romantic love, attraction, and repulsion. These discourses
have thereby framed the new technologies and the airport security check-
point as yet another opportunity to succeed or fail at attractively imag-
ing one’s body for the male gaze and according to Euro-­American stan-
dards of beauty, health, and fitness. In this manner, U.S. public discourse
about the scanners has ignored the fact that the differential application
of high- and low-­tech surveillance methods is organized according to a
racial norm, where race is understood not in the narrow terms of pheno-
type but in the broader terms of who is presumed capable of participating
in the biopolitical project of terrorism prevention and who is written off
as stubbornly opaque.
Using sex to obscure race and ethnicity in U.S. public discourse about
post-­9/11 security culture is not a minor oversight. Rather, it is a tragi-
cally superficial distraction that supports the unthinking adoption of a
differentially applied preemptive legal framework at home and abroad. A
narrow view of new surveillance technologies through the lens of sexual
privacy misses the fact that the racial norm is what has facilitated the
rollout of preemptive laws in the war on terror and made the domestic
culture of terrorism prevention palatable to citizens of governments who
feel besieged by the threat of terrorism. The difference between how sus-
pected terrorists in the war on terror and passenger-­suspects in U.S. air-
ports are treated renders the indefinite extension of surveillance on both
fronts palatable to a majority of U.S. citizens, demonstrated through a
critique of the aesthetics of transparency operative in new surveillance
technologies and of the discourses surrounding their adoption.

Notes

1. I first articulated some of these ideas in 2007. For an extended analysis of the
aesthetics and politics of transparency, see my book The Transparent Traveler: The
Performance and Culture of Airport Security (Duke University Press, 2015).
2. The online special report is no longer available, but the initial story is (cnn
.com 2003).
3. Marita Sturken reads the work of some of the artists included in the show

148 Rachel Hall
Safe: Design Takes on Risk (2005) at the Museum of Modern Art as critical commen-
taries on risk culture as a form of “privileged paranoia” (2005, 82). See also Anto-
nelli 2005.
4. See “Technology That Might Have Helped,” New York Times, 27 December
2009, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/27/us/terror-­graphic.html.
5. See “Health Information Privacy,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Ser-
vices website, http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy.
6. “A Guide to Disability Rights Laws,” U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights
Division, July 2009, http://www.ada.gov/cguide.htm.
7. See “Travelers with Disabilities and Medical Conditions,” Transportation Secu-
rity Administration website, http://www.tsa.gov/traveler-­information/travelers
-­disabilities-­and-­medical-­conditions.
8. See “Travelers with Disabilities and Medical Conditions,” Transportation Secu-
rity Administration website, http://www.tsa.gov/traveler-­information/travelers
-­disabilities-­and-­medical-­conditions.
9. See “Mobility Impairments,” Transportation Security Administration website,
http://www.tsa.gov/traveler-­information/mobility-­impairments.
10. Electronic Privacy Information Center (epic) filed a Freedom of Informa-
tion Act request and obtained documents from the Department of Homeland Secu-
rity (dhs), which provided evidence that the government failed to conduct proper
safety tests on the x-­ray scanners before installing them in airports and dismissed
tsa employees’ concerns about excessive exposure to radiation. epic argues that
the documents indicate that the dhs mischaracterized safety findings by the Na-
tional Institute of Standards and Technology (nist). A nist official stated in an
email that the agency had not tested the scanners for safety over time. The tsa has
yet to respond to requests by tsa union representatives at Boston Logan Airport
for the tsa to allow its screeners to wear radiation-­monitoring devices or dosime-
ters. See Romero 2011.
11. With 250 backscatter machines already installed in airports and warehouses,
the tsa canceled its contract with the security company, which, at the company’s
expense, had to remove the machines by 31 May 2013. The tsa continues to use
millimeter-­wave body scanners. See Halsey 2013.
12. Exemplary in this regard are Kelly Gates (2011) and Shoshana Amielle Mag-
net (2011). The feminist critique of privacy insists that defending the privacy rights
of individuals is an insufficient and problematic goal of surveillance studies as a
field, given that welfare recipients, people living in poverty, and queers have never
been entitled to privacy, as well the fact that privacy has not always kept women
safer (i.e., violence against women and children often occurs in the home). For a cri-
tique of the use of biometric technologies on welfare recipients, see Magnet 2011.
For a critique of the privacy debate from the perspective of low-­income mothers,
see Gilliom 2001. For a critique of the heterosexism of the privacy critique of sur-
veillance, see McGrath 2004.

Terror and the Female Grotesque 149

 8
THE PUBLIC FETUS AND
THE VEILED WOMAN
Transnational Surrogacy Blogs as Surveillant Assemblage

S AYA N TA N I D A S G U P TA A N D S H A M I TA D A S D A S G U P TA

“Our bump!”
Below these words is a striking image: a brown-­skinned pregnant
woman, swathed in a sparkling silver and pink sari, her protruding abdo-
men the focus of the photograph, her face conspicuously absent. Fecund,
colorful, exotic, this online photograph is but one of many such “head-
less” belly images on blogs with names like Million Rupee Baby, Chai Baby,
Our Adventures in Indian Surrogacy, Masala Baby, and Baby Masala. The
pregnant bodies captured on the sites are not those of the bloggers. This
is a new version of the parenting blog: written by U.S., European, and
Australian couples who have contracted Indian women to be their gesta-
tional surrogates.
The image of the sari-­clad headless surrogate has become something
of a symbol for Western rhetoric around transnational surrogacy. In 2007
the U.S. women’s fashion magazine Marie Claire ran an article which cata-
pulted transnational surrogacy into mainstream consciousness in the
United States, with the sensationalist title “Surrogate Mothers: Womb for
Rent.”1 One prominent caption read, “The number of Indian women will-
ing to carry an American child is growing fast” (Haworth 2007). That Marie
Claire article was accompanied by a full-­page color photograph featuring
the bodies of three sari-­clad pregnant Indian women. The brown-­skinned
women’s protuberant bellies were swathed in saris in rice-­paddy green,
vermilion orange, and eggplant purple. Yet, in contrast to the women’s
bodies, the women’s heads and faces were strikingly absent. Even when
the Indian surrogate’s head was visible, her face was usually swathed with
a veil or a surgical mask (Chu 2006; Haimowitz and Sinha 2008). Osten-
sibly, the heads and faces of Indian surrogates are left out to protect them
from community and family censure; in cultural contexts where surro-
gacy may be stigmatized, it might be assumed surrogates have had sexual
intercourse to get pregnant. Yet, images of headless (or veiled) Indian
surrogates clearly serve other rhetorical agendas regarding gender, race,
class, sexuality, embodiment, reproduction, technology, and nationhood.
Visual cultural studies and gender studies have long theorized the re-
lationship between women’s bodies and the public gaze. The portrayal
of women’s bodies and body parts as passive recipients of a masculine
heteronormative gaze has been discussed by many, from feminist film
theorists (Mulvey 1975) to social activists writing on gender and advertis-
ing (Kilbourne 2000). Indeed, we have elsewhere suggested that the Marie
Claire image of the headless Indian surrogate is one that encourages in
the viewer “a gaze pregnant with Orientalist possibilities, in which the
faceless body of the surrogate is very literally unable to look back” (Das-
Gupta and Dasgupta 2010).2 This image can also be understood in light
of Michel Foucault’s (1995) construction of the docile body frozen in time
and space, removed of subjectivity. In the words of Marina DelVecchio
(2011), writing on violence against women in advertising, “If a woman is
looked upon as an object, without feelings, life, soul, or thoughts, then it
is easy to ingest images of her that defy her humanity. . . . She is merely a
body, a vacant, empty, vessel intended to contain the needs of others . . .
and her body, which is the most desired aspect of her existence . . . is open
for interpretation and domination.”
Commercial transnational gestational surrogacy, or “transnational
surrogacy,” in India is a practice marked by foreign (often North Ameri-
can, Australian, and European) infertile couples (intended parents, or
ips) hiring the services of Indian surrogates, who are implanted with fer-
tilized ova of the ips’ choice and carry “their” fetuses to term.3 As gesta-
tional surrogates only, these Indian women have no genetic relationship
to the fetus they are carrying. After delivery, the surrogates hand over the
babies to the intended parents in exchange for money. The process is me-
diated by agencies and fertility clinics engaged in transnational reproduc-
tive commerce. Similarly, popular-­culture narratives about transnational

Public Fetus and Veiled Woman 151

surrogacy are authored almost uniformly by reporters or by Western ip
bloggers, not by the surrogates themselves.
In this chapter we examine the blogging practices of Western ips vis-­
à-­vis Indian surrogates, suggesting that such blogs serve as locations of
surveillance. In particular, we interrogate two cultural practices of West-
ern ip bloggers: the posting of online 3-­D and 4-­D ultrasound images of
“their” fetuses gestating in the wombs of Indian surrogates; and the post-
ing of “belly shots” or “bump shots” of the surrogates, which are the head-
less or veiled images of the mid-sections of (brown-­skinned, sari-­clad)
surrogates.
Using both scholarship in surveillance studies and about reproduc-
tive technologies, we make the case that transnational surrogacy can be
understood as not only about gender, race, and visuality, but also about
power and technoscience, citizenship, reproduction, production, and con-
sumption. In addition, transnational surrogacy in India cannot be under-
stood outside of its historic and political contexts—particularly as a phe-
nomenon that exists within a post-­9/11 globalized marketplace, where
the impetus for economic “outsourcing” (for cheaper goods, services, and
labor) comes into direct conflict with the xenophobic nationalist anxi-
eties of Western nations about breached borders and veiled bodies. As
such, we locate our discussion of transnational surrogacy in India within
the emerging discipline of feminist surveillance studies, borrowing spe-
cifically from Deborah Wilson Lowry’s (2004) assertion that reproductive
technologies can be understood as “surveillant assemblages” and Rachel
Hall’s (2007; this volume) discussions of the “aesthetics of transparency”
in the policing of U.S. borderlands.

Method and Theory: Blogging as Surveillant Assemblage

We surveyed several blogs and two message boards written by ips resid-
ing in North America, Europe, and Australia.4 We focused on blogs that
were explicit about the ips’ Indian surrogacy experience (usually in their
blog title) and that were by couples who presented as either heterosexual
or homosexual (same-­sex male couples). We did not find blogs by les-
bian couples involved in transnational surrogacy. We used the sidebar
blogrolls of each site to track other bloggers when they commented, and
in this way we discovered new sites. Most of the blogs were by couples
who, from the photos they posted, appeared to be white, Anglo-­Saxon.
The message boards we surveyed were populated almost entirely by indi-

152 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

viduals identifying as women, both Western surrogates and Western in-
tended mothers (ims). We did not know the ethnicity of most message-­
boarders, except when we recognized a name from the Indian surrogacy
blogosphere or when the message-­boarder posted a profile picture.5
In previous work (DasGupta and Dasgupta 2011), we examined blogs
and message boards as locations of auto/biography, understanding blogs
as forms of digital diary writing. In the words of Laurie McNeil, “In their
immediacy and accessibility, in their seemingly unmediated state, Web
diaries blur the distinction between online and offline lives, ‘virtual
reality’ and ‘real life,’ ‘public’ and ‘private,’ and most intriguingly . . . be-
tween the life and the text” (McNeil 2003, 25). The lens of feminist surveil-
lance studies serves to deepen our understanding of these digital diaries.
In their foundational work in surveillance studies, Kevin D. Haggerty
and Richard V. Ericson (2000) suggest that the notion of a “surveillant as-
semblage” is a way to understand surveillance beyond the Orwellian Big
Brother or the Foucauldian panopticon. Drawing from the work of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), Haggerty and Ericson are concerned
not with one form of technology, but rather with how fluid systems of
technologies and practices work together to analyze and break down
bodies into their component parts, gathering and organizing this infor-
mation, and operating in ways that are not “top down” (a panoptic gaze
looking down from above) but increasingly horizontal in nature, where,
in their words, there is a “rhizomatic crisscrossing of the gaze such that
no major population groups stand irrefutably above or outside of the sur-
veillant assemblage” (2000, 618). In addition, they assert, “A great deal of
surveillance is directed toward the human body. The observed body is . . .
broken down by being abstracted from its territorial setting. It is then re-
assembled in different settings through a series of data flows. The result
is a decorpo-­realized body, a ‘data double’ of pure virtuality” (ibid., 611).
Lowry builds on these understandings to assert that reproductive
technologies and services form “an assemblage that monitors and dis-
tributes information about pregnant women” (2004, 364). She points to
gestational ultrasonography’s abstraction of the fetus from the maternal
body as an example of how the surveillance assemblage of reproductive
technologies breaks down, abstracts, and reassembles female bodies. In
addition to Lowry’s understanding of reproductive technologies as sur-
veillant assemblages, Hall’s (2007; this volume) formulation of the aes-
thetics of transparency influences our discussion. Hall locates her analy-
sis at national rather than reproductive borderlands, where Ziplock bags

Public Fetus and Veiled Woman 153

revealing the body’s hygiene products represent the state’s investment in
policing bodies and bodily interiors. Such policing becomes framed as a
way to “root out terror,” that is, perceived threats to a particular formu-
lated notion of national (and racial) integrity. In Hall’s words, “The aes-
thetics of transparency is motivated by the desire to turn the world (the
body) inside-­out such that there would no longer be any secrets or interi-
ors, human or geographical, in which our enemies (or the enemy within)
might find refuge. . . . [It] establishes a binary opposition between interi-
ority and exteriority and privileges the external or visible surface over
the suspect’s word” (2007, 321). Fetal images are consistent with Lowry’s
discussions of reproductive-­imaging technologies, such as ultrasound,
which fetishize the fetus as something separate from the mother. And
yet, images of pregnant surrogates, even “veiled” or headless surrogates,
seemingly contradict this impulse, bringing the fetal context (the gestat-
ing maternal body) firmly into view. These two gestures appear to bring
into conflict Hall’s assertion that an aesthetics of transparency relies on
a “binary opposition between interiority and exteriority.” We investigate
the tension between the kind of reproductive surveillance undertaken in
clinic rooms and the sort of national borderland surveillance conducted
in airports. While the former visualizes reproductive interiority in the
form of the fetus, the latter brings into focus the exteriority of the gen-
dered and racialized “foreign” subject—desired for the products of her
labor, yet simultaneously distanced and suspect. We examine how trans-
national ip blogs, which routinely post both sorts of images, exemplify
a new, globalized world order of surveillance not operated from “above”
but horizontally, as part of a digital “rhizometric crisscrossing of gaze[s].”
The ultrasonographic and photographic images posted on the blogs of
infertile couples from the Global North become part of the information
networks and “centers of calculation” (Haggerty and Ericsson 2000, 603)
of an international surveillant assemblage, playing out on the bodies of
women from the Global South.
Ultimately, a feminist perspective on questions of surveillance high-
lights the connections between transnational surrogacy and the tenuous
integrity of national bodies and body politics, as well as gendered, racial-
ized, and reproductive bodies. These embodied borderlands are policed
only minimally by various state policies on surrogacy, gamete dona-
tion, and citizenship, since policymakers are essentially playing catch-­
up to the rapidly changing realities of assisted reproductive technologies
(arts), particularly on the transnational stage. We suggest that trans-

154 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

national surrogacy brings to the fore in surveillance studies scholarship
the critical importance of not only gender, race, and embodiment, but
also ­colonialism.

Background: Global Surrogacy

and Its Informational Networks

Since becoming legal in 2002, the Indian surrogacy industry has been
booming. U.S. media headlines consistently compare Indian surrogacy to
other forms of Indian “tech support” (World Vision 2009), although this
conflation is decidedly vexed.6 Every major city in India has joined in the
surrogacy trade and offers gestational surrogacy services to all who can
afford the fees, including foreign (mostly Western) clients and wealthy
Indians.
Explanations for this growth industry are many. In a country with an
overwhelming number of economically desperate citizens, where Eng-
lish is spoken commonly among the professional classes, and world-­class
medical services and technologies are available at drastically cheaper
rates, Indian transnational surrogacy is a lucrative market. Consider that
in India the cost of gestational surrogacy might be $22,000 or less, while
in the United States it might run to $100,000 (Fontanella-­Khan 2010).7
Indian surrogates reportedly receive $2,000–­$5,000 (Wade 2009a), money
often used for family expenses, which might include a child’s surgery, a
new dwelling, or a spouse’s business. Despite its clear benefits to Indian
women in terms of economic gain, surrogacy in India is marked by a dras-
tic lack of regulation, practice guidelines, and transparency, allowing for
exploitation of the surrogates.8 Indeed, Amrita Pande (2009a) found that
Indian surrogates did not discuss surrogacy as a “choice,” but rather as an
economic “compulsion.” Yet even as the Assisted Reproductive Technolo-
gies (Regulation) Bill–2010 proposed by India’s Ministry of Health and
Family Welfare is awaiting legislative approval, the industry keeps grow-
ing in response to the demands in the West (Government of India 2010;
Pande 2009b).
The digital “information networks” of transnational surrogacy in-
clude online brokers such as Planet Hospital (www.planethospital.com)
and Surrogacy India (www.surrogacyindia.com), who make the connec-
tions between Western ips and Indian fertility clinics. While surrogates
are usually recruited by local, “on the ground” women engaged by Indian
fertility clinics, various online modes of communication, such as email

Public Fetus and Veiled Woman 155

and Skype, facilitate negotiations between Western ips and Indian physi-
cians, allow ips to view ultrasounds and other screening tests, and me-
diate the ips’ relationship with both the surrogates and the fetuses they
bear.9 Online communications include blogs and message boards that
help Western ips connect with others like themselves.
Although the rhetoric of transnational surrogacy in India, like the
rhetoric about surrogacy in the West, is marked by assertions about “gift
exchange” and “sisterhood,” these ideas serve to obfuscate the commer-
cial and exploitative aspects of the industry (DasGupta and Dasgupta
2010). Indeed, we found that despite evoking a rhetoric of sisterhood
vis-­à-­vis their Indian surrogates, ips tend to focus in their blogs on con-
nections between ips rather than on connections to surrogates. We have
elsewhere argued that ip blogs constitute a sort of cross-­border “cyber-­
nation” (here labeled “digital nation”) marked by bonds between West-
ern ip bloggers, regardless of North American, European, or Australian
citizenship, united through various practices, including the “othering” of
both Indian surrogates and India itself, as well as the espousing of colo-
nial and capitalist worldviews (DasGupta and Dasgupta 2011). Surveil-
lance is, of course a key part of nation building, and the digital nation
of ip bloggers has characteristics of what David Lyon (1994) would call a
“surveillance society.” This surveillance society is involved in a colonial-
ist project that particularly manifests itself in gendered, racialized, and
otherwise embodied ways. The surveillance statecraft of the Western ip
“nation” breaks down the brown woman’s body into its component parts,
creating what Haggerty and Ericson call “a series of discrete signifying
flows” (2000, 612), while simultaneously protecting its digital-­national
borders from the brown woman’s disruptive presence. Like Hall’s (2007)
airport-­security ziplock bags, the surrogate’s interiority is made transpar-
ent, but, simultaneously, her exteriority is either veiled or decapitated—
effectively “disappeared.”

Offline Surveillance Practices:

Regulating Surrogate Consumption

Bringing a needy woman from the village to the clinic is a small first step
in the whole process of “manufacturing” what Pande (2010) calls “the
perfect mother-­worker.” This mother-­worker is produced through a dis-
ciplinary project that deploys the power of language along with a meticu-
lous control over the body of the surrogate. While the practice is not con-

156 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

sistent across clinics, many Indian surrogates spend their pregnancy at
the clinic’s attached dormitory, where the surrogates’ nutrition, health,
and activities are controlled by the clinic’s staff (Haworth 2007; Oprah
.com 2007). Although some surrogates at other clinics “hide out” in rented
apartments for the duration of their pregnancy to escape the censure of
their local communities, the practice of “housing” surrogates in dormito-
ries is growing in popularity.
Pande notes that “The perfect surrogate—cheap, docile, selfless, and
nurturing—is produced in the fertility clinics and surrogacy hostels”
(2010, 970). The physical manifestations of this production are a strictly
regulated schedule involving the surveillance of bodily activities, includ-
ing eating, medication, and rest, as well as stringent control over mo-
bility, access to other children, and family. The rhetorical manifestations
of this production process include assertions by the clinic staff about the
interchangeability and disposability of the surrogate body (which is re-
petitively framed as a “vessel” or “rental house”), and the differentiation
between “good” (selfless, giving, nurturant) and “bad” (greedy, demand-
ing, assertive) mother-­workers (Pande 2010). The growing phenomenon
of the Indian surrogate dormitory (or “hostel”) can be understood as one
manifestation of offline surveillance—consistent with Foucault’s “disci-
plinary project” (1995). Haggerty and Ericson distinguish the surveillant
assemblage as different from the Foucauldian disciplinary project, they
see it as something which does not “approach the body . . . [rather] it is
. . . to be molded, punished, or controlled” (2000, 612). The body is some-
thing that must first be “known.” If we look at the surrogate dormitory
not solely as a disciplinary space, but also as a space that allows Western
ip bloggers and message-­boarders to “know” the bodies of “their” sur-
rogates, the surveillant possibilities of the surrogate dormitory become
clear.
Through a surveillance of consumption, the interiority of surrogate
women, or at least an aspect of this interiority (what they put into their
bodies), becomes readily apparent to Western ips. On blogs and message
boards, dormitories are usually lauded as ways to “understand” surro-
gate (read: fetal) nutrition. On a now defunct discussion forum called
Surrogacy India Online Support Group, Western women discussed the
need for surrogates to have vitamin supplements and debate the quali-
ties of a “typical Indian diet.” The conversations here are very much in the
vein of increasing “knowledge” about caloric intake, typical Indian meals,
and other aspects of surrogate nutritional health. One forum participant,

Public Fetus and Veiled Woman 157

Myleen, writes, “I just want to make sure that the surrogate has all that
she needs to create a healthy environment for the baby. It is your baby.
Nothing wrong with asking.” Another participant, Mandy, adds, “We all
want our surrogates to eat healthy, that’s why i [sic] chose Dr. Patel be-
cause they are in a surrogate house and can be assisted with access to
nutritious food” (Surrogacy India Online Support Group 2009). Sarah, a
forty-­year-­old from Berkeley who runs a catering company with her hus-
band and teaches Jewish ethics lessons to children, says, “When I was
told by my doctor they could get someone in Stockton [California], I don’t
know what they’re eating, what they’re doing. Their physical environment
would have been a concern for me.” Sarah continues: “The way they have
things set up . . . [in India] is that the surrogate’s sole purpose is to carry
a healthy baby for someone” (Carney 2010). Additionally, Nayna Patel, of
the Akanksha Infertility Clinic, promotes Indian surrogacy by tapping
into a narrative of a morally pure mystic East, suggesting that Indian
surrogates are “free of [read: Western] vices, like alcohol, smoking, and
drugs” (Gentleman 2008). Echoing this sentiment, another Western ip
suggests, “One of the nicest things about [India] is that the women don’t
drink or smoke.” Although most U.S. surrogacy contracts forbid such ac-
tivities, the Western ip asserts, “I take people in India more for their word
than probably I would in the United States” (Carney 2010).

The Public Fetus: Fetal Citizenship on Intended Parent Blogs

Many scholars of reproductive technology, including Rosalind Petchesky,

Emily Martin, Carol Stabile, and Janelle S. Taylor, have long argued that
obstetric ultrasound technology has created a “cult of the public fetus,”
whose task involves “revealing and unmasking what has been hidden and
obscured, inevitably draw[ing] us into a politics of vision” (Taylor 2004,
189).10 The fetus becomes a fetishized figure, both “already a baby,” rep-
resenting the “patient” as separate from the mother, and a sort of “‘baby
man,’ an autonomous, atomized mini-­ spacehero” (Petchesky 1987).
Established as a separate visual identity outside the mother, the fetus be-
comes a public persona in the U.S. cultural imagination, used for agendas
that range from selling Volvos to promoting anti-­abortion campaigns.11
In the words of Paul P. Brodwin, “Laparoscopy and fetal photography . . .
furnish ever more invasive and naturalized depictions of the fetus, which
performs the crucial ideological work (in the context of new Right politics

158 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

in the United States) of visually separating mother and fetus, asserting
fetal autonomy, and reducing women to passive reproducing machines”
(2000, 4).
A central practice of “ultrasound culture” is cherishing fetal ultrasound
images, which take positions of honor on mantelpieces, in photo albums,
in wallets, on refrigerators, and, importantly, online. No longer relegated
to medical, private, or real-­life locations, blogs, Facebook photos, and
Flickr and Twitter accounts are rife with images of fetal ultrasounds. The
practice is so common that media outlets, from online maternity blogs
(Koch 2010) to the venerable Wall Street Journal (Wong 2009), have de-
bated whether posting ultrasounds is appropriate sharing in the age of
digital communities or simply “tmi” (too much information). Follow-
ing suit, not unlike similar (nonsurrogacy) sites in the “mommy blogo-
sphere,” transnational surrogacy ip blogs often post ultrasound images
of “their” embryos/fetuses. From very early images of three implanted
embryos or “three little nuggets” (prior to scheduled selective termina-
tion) at Our Dream to Have a Baby through India Surrogacy to 4-­D images
of thirty-­two-­week fetuses with recognizable facial features at Chai Baby,
ultrasound blog posts are a common feature of transnational surrogacy
sites.12 Indian art clinics recognize 3-­D and 4-­D fetal ultrasound images
as an important product that allows transnational clients to feel con-
nected to “their” pregnancies. In 2007, when this technology was still
relatively new, the Akanksha Infertility Clinic proudly advertised the
availability of 4-­D ultrasounds on their website, saying, “Parents can . . .
appreciate the fetal parts like face, spine, limbs, fingers and every single
organ as if they are actually looking at the fetus. 4-­D ultrasound enables
us to see real time images of fetal movements like yawning, thumb suck-
ing, swallowing, etc.” (Kohl 2007). The surveillance of embodied interi-
ority also becomes a way to police surrogate mobility. In the surrogate
dormitory, ultrasounds are used as markers of “good surrogate behavior.”
In the words of one of Pande’s interviewees, Varsha, “I am being extra
careful now because Doctor Madam has said if everything looks all right
in the ultrasound I can go visit my children. I don’t want to do anything
that will make Madam change her mind about letting me go home for a
day or two” (2010, 982).
The cultural work of online ultrasound posts by ips is ultimately dif-
ferent than that of nonsurrogacy sites, in that they serve to reduce the
distance between the body of the intended parent and the fetus, making

Public Fetus and Veiled Woman 159

invisible the body of the gestating surrogate. As opposed to a gestat-
ing woman’s multiply mediated relationship with her fetus (through a
technologist, a screen, and so on), the surrogate’s fetal images are ex-
ponentially mediated—first by a physician who performs an ultrasound
in India, then via emails of the images to the ip, and then through the
ip blogger who subsequently posts these online. The posted ultrasound
images effectively obscure any perceived differences between an intended
mother through surrogacy and a gestating mother: bloggers who are preg-
nant and ip bloggers are able to post ultrasound images of “their” fetuses,
granting an internal vision in a (digital)space where material bodies—
whether pregnant or not—are effectively dis-­appeared.13

Baby Bumps and Belly Shots:

The Veiled or Headless Surrogate

Although it garnered significant negative reactions at the time, the Au-

gust 1991 cover of the U.S. fashion magazine Vanity Fair—which featured
a decidedly pregnant Demi Moore, a Hollywood actor, clad only in dia-
monds—marked a Western cultural shift in the ways pregnant bellies are
publicly viewed (Stabile 1998). The celebrity “belly bump” has become a
great cultural fascination and is fetishized. Similar to fetal ultrasound
images, photographs of pregnant women’s midsections are now de rigeur
on social-­networking sites and blogs. Similarly, ip bloggers frequently
post images of belly bumps—the fundamental difference being, of
course, that the bellies in question do not belong to them. Such images—
of brown skinned, sari-­swathed surrogate bellies—have the potential
to erase the embodied surrogate. If posting ultrasound images on blogs
effectively “abstracts” a fetus from its “territorial setting” (Haggerty and
Ericson 2000, 611), then posting a surrogate belly bump potentially re-
situates the fetus in the maternal body. Yet, this embodied presence is
not without its own complexities. While some blogs include photographs
of the pregnant surrogate’s body and face, most “belly shots” are so called
because they are limited to the surrogates’ midsection. For instance, the
ip bloggers “Amani and Bob” posted the image described at the opening of
this chapter (protruding abdomen of a brown-­skinned pregnant woman
wrapped in a sparkling silver and pink sari, her face absent) along with
the following text, highlighting the complex connections between visual
consumption and economic consumption or gift giving.

160 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

 Introducing . . . our front bump!
Our bump! Don’t look side on as I did, and think “what a lovely slim
pregnant lady” the pic is taken from front on, so belly is poking out the
front. Our smr [surrogate mother] was very shy and squirmy and ran
away from the camera. Bless her. A bump is a bump, I see a bump and I
am loving that bump! I have a gift for smr that I have had tucked away
for ages. Dr Shivani doesn’t encourage gift-­giving until after baby is
born. I am busting to send it and to write smr a card and tell her how
wonderful I think she is, and what an amazing job she is doing. But we
have to wait (Thursday, 1 April 2010).14
The blogger’s comments reinforce an orientalist gaze, suggesting a para-
doxical relationship to the surrogate: ascribing agency to the surrogate
posing for the image (she runs from the camera, for instance), at the
same time as the blogger makes clear the belly and fetus belong to the
blogger. This comes through in the comments as well. For example, com-
menter George, a single father of two babies by Indian surrogacy, remarks
on the above: “beautiful! can i rub her belly for good luck? looks like she
dressed in all her finest for the pic, and she said she is shy? lol.” George
emphasizes the surrogate as agentic (she dressed up for the occasion),
at the same time as he frames her as a kind of good-­luck charm, an ob-
ject one “rubs” for good luck. As well, the various commenters use the
pronoun your instead of her when referring to the “bump,” as does the
blogger herself (“Our front bump!”), cementing the idea that the head-
less belly “belongs” to the blogger im, not the surrogate, or suggesting,
even more disturbingly, that the surrogate herself “belongs” to the im
(“Our smr”), and therefore so does the surrogate’s pregnant uterus. The
cultural capital of the belly shot—almost as ubiquitous on the blogs as
the ultrasound images—is always prominent. For instance, Johnny and
Darren, a gay Australian couple who had their babies by Indian surrogacy,
remark on Amani and Bob’s pregnancy-­bump photo: “Great picture, you
both must be happy to have this. I know when we received ours it took
pride of place on the fridge door.”15
The request to “see the bump” is heard consistently in other trans-
national surrogacy narratives. This is illustrated in the documentary Our
Family, Made in India (Heinemann 2011), featuring Rhonda and Gerry
from Mesa, Arizona, as they Skype with their Indian surrogate, Jaya. Dur-
ing the phone call, Gerry asks, “Is your belly growing? Let’s see!” When
the surrogate, who is carrying twins, obligingly stands (after the request

Public Fetus and Veiled Woman 161

is translated by her interpreter), he responds, “There’s our babies!” An al-
most identical Skype call is filmed in the documentary Can We See the Baby
Bump Please? (Surabhi 2012) but from the Indian side. After being asked,
through a translator, to show her bump, the Indian surrogate stands. The
translator angles the computer with its built-­in camera toward her mid-
section, instructing the surrogate to smooth her clothing over her belly
so the overseas ips can better see her bump through the magic of the on-
line video connection.
The problematic nature of the belly shot is articulated by bloggers
themselves. The blogger at Chai Baby notes,
Today we received some beautiful photos of our surrogate. We didn’t
ask for them and as it turns out it is something that sci [the Indian
surrogacy agency] are trying to do more of, so we can see the progress
of our surrogacy. . . . Before i received our photos, i felt that the “belly
shot” was a bit exploitative and felt generally uncomfortable about
it all. It seemed to reduce our surrogate to the bits that carried our
babies. Now i have these wonderful shots of our smiling surrogate,
with a tentative wave to the camera and it’s different. She is smiling
and looks content and clearly pregnant, with our babies.16
Although the blogger notes that the surrogate is smiling, the image she
posts is consistent with the surveillant assemblage’s practice of separat-
ing bodies into component parts: a classic side belly shot without a head.
The agency of the surrogate implied by the mention of smiling and wav-
ing is undermined by the fact that the image represents something the
surrogacy agencies, not the surrogates themselves, orchestrate to please
their precious overseas clients and provide a desired image, one that as-
sists in deciphering for the ips the otherwise “shy,” invisible, and incom-
prehensible surrogate.

Conclusion: Interiority and Exteriority, the Fetus and the Veil

How are we to understand the seemingly contradictory gestures of post-

ing fetal images and images of headless or veiled surrogates’ bellies?
These images enact a tension between the gestating mother, the ip, and
the fetus, between exteriority and interiority, between material embodi-
ment and the reconstitution of “data double” bodies in digital space. By
locating the fetal image in the space of the blogosphere, the blogger re-
inscribes fetal autonomy, while at the same time implanting the fetus in

162 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

the ip digital nation. Simultaneously, the headless gestating belly pro-
vides a nod to the presence of the surrogate, while disallowing any real
agency, any literal or figurative “face.”
Feminist surveillance scholars Shoshana Amielle Magnet and Tara
Rodgers (2012) have discussed how post-­9/11 Transportation Security Ad-
ministration surveillance practices, including backscatter x-­rays (which
visualize the body naked underneath its clothes), effectively “out” trans-
gender, disability, and other marginalized identities. Using Hall’s (2007)
“aesthetics of transparency,” they suggest that this “outing” occurs as well
with Muslim—or presumed Muslim—individuals with the state’s desires
to “see beneath the veil” of women wearing the burqua or niquab. In their
words, “Claims about the importance of visualizing veiled bodies refer-
ence stereotypes about the inscrutability of racialized subjects (Said, 1978
as quoted by Magnet and Rodgers). More specifically . . . they reference
a feminized Orient, one whose secret interiors must be “unveiled” and
“exposed to the light of Western knowledge” (Gabeba Baderoon, 2003
as quoted by Magnet and Rodgers). Similarly, in his analysis of early
twentieth-­century postcards of veiled Algerian women, Mallek Alloula
(1986) posits,
The first thing the foreign eye catches about Algerian women is that
they are concealed from sight. . . . [T]he eye cannot catch hold of her.
. . . The opaque veil . . . discourages the scopic desire (the voyeurism) of
the photographer. . . . These veiled women are not only an embarrass-
ing enigma to the photographer but an outright attack upon him. It
must be believed that the feminine gaze that filters through the veil is
a gaze of a particular kind: concentrated by the tiny orifice for the eye,
this womanly gaze is like that of the camera. . . . [T]hrust in the pres-
ence of a veiled woman, the photographer feels photographed. . . . [H]e
is dispossessed of his own gaze. (1986, 521–22, 524)
Although Alloula’s work is not often considered in the context of sur-
veillance studies, his insights regarding the veiled, gendered subject, the
colonial project, and visual desire deepen our understandings of both
the surveillant assemblage and the aesthetics of transparency. Indeed,
the impetus to “unveil” the hitherto “veiled” has been prevalent in re-
cent U.S. narratives justifying the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which
public acceptance of war becomes tied to investments in the “unveiling”
of Muslim women—a concern that can be understood as not so much
about the freedom of women as about the inhibition of the misogynist

Public Fetus and Veiled Woman 163

and colonial proprietary gaze (Abu-­Lughod 2002; Ahmed 1992; Viner
2002), as well as the visual neutralization of (brown-­skinned, Islamic)
“terrorist” threats.17
What we suggest is that the Western ip’s gaze vis-­à-­vis the Indian sur-
rogate is one which, like the backscatter x-­ray, claims the ultimate in in-
teriority through its “unveiling” of the boundaries of the surrogate’s re-
productive body. The fetal ultrasound becomes a mechanism by which
the surrogate’s “secret interiors” are “ ‘unveiled’ and exposed to the light
of Western knowledge” (Magnet and Rogers 2012). Yet, the surrogate her-
self remains veiled, incomprehensible, and faceless. Indeed, the image
of the headless or veiled surrogate may be symbolic of the anxiety of the
Western ips regarding their distant surrogates, whom they cannot readily
“gaze upon” or “catch hold of.” In the words of the ip Lisa Switzer,
There’s somebody else that I don’t see and I don’t know, and I have no
contact with, that’s carrying a child for me. I worry about her, because
I look at what the standard of living is around here. I know that these
women who are doing this surrogacy . . . they’re getting paid quite a
bit of money by their standards. The living conditions here . . . these
are not Western living conditions. These are very very poor conditions.
And my heart goes out to the people who live this way, but they don’t
know any better. (Haimowitz and Sinha 2008)
We see here the tension between transparent interiors and inscrutable
exteriors, paralleling the same tensions in the type of surveillance done
at national borderlands to “root out terror.” In the words of Hall, “The
aesthetics of transparency can thus be defined as an attempt by the secu-
rity state to force a correspondence between interiority and exteriority
on the objects of the preventative gaze” (this volume, 127). The distant,
impoverished surrogate represents a reproductive, if not traditional, na-
tional security threat. Her poverty, her foreignness, her racial otherness
all represent sources of potential “terror” to the ip digital nation. In turn,
the ip digital nation attempts to neutralize this threat by “knowing” the
surrogate’s nutritional and vitamin status and visualizing her uterine in-
teriors in the form of the fetal ultrasound. Ubiquitous requests to see her
baby bump via Skype and emailed photos may represent what Hall calls
an attempt to “flatten the object of surveillance” (this volume, 128), yet
the surrogate’s ultimate distance and inscrutability remain.
In the Levinasian formulation of mutuality, it is the “face” of the
other that is brought into the light of recognition by the self who heeds

164 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

the other’s “primordial call” (Irvine 2005). As such, the headless belly-­
bump shot signals an undermining of this sort of recognition: it is a “re-­
veiling” of the surrogate such that not only is she unable to “be recog-
nized” or to gaze back, but her reproductive body alone is present and
not her subjecthood. For the Western ip digital nation, it is ultimately
the fetal “face” which is unveiled through biotechnology, and it is this
fetal image which replaces the surrogate’s own literal and figurative face
in the Western ip gaze. In the words of Barbara Katz Rothman, “Babies,
at least healthy white babies, are very precious products these days.
Mothers, rather like South African diamond miners, are cheap, expend-
able, not-­too-­trustworthy labour necessary to produce the precious prod-
uct” (2004, 19).
In Margaret Atwood’s postapocalyptic novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985),
Earth’s few remaining fertile women are forced to be “handmaids”—­
bearing children for the (infertile) ruling class. In the Red Center, their
restrictive dormitory, they are taught that no other parts of their bodies
other than their uteruses matter; their hands and feet, for instance, are
subject to torture and abuse. So, too, are the handmaids’ heads and most
of their faces covered by a “stiff white veil,” which they must wear or risk
punishment of death. There are no mirrors in their world; they are not
meant to see or be seen, but exist solely for the reproductive potential
they offer “the Commander” and his wife. Faces disappear from the mem-
ory of one handmaid, even as she herself becomes “de-­faced” by her sur-
roundings.
I try to congure [sic], to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are.
I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind
my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won’t stay still
for me, they move, there’s a smile and it’s gone, their features curl
and bend as if the paper’s burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse,
a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a
face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards
them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever
they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won’t.
It’s my fault. I am forgetting too much. (Atwood 1985, 193)
Where, in all this, is the voice of the Indian surrogate? Like her veiled or
headless image, she is by and large voiceless—made invisible and mute—
on ip blogs and discussion sites, unable to participate in Haggerty and
Ericson’s (2000) “rhizometric criss-­crossing of the gaze.” She is looked

Public Fetus and Veiled Woman 165

upon, but does not look and cannot implicate others in her looking. These
conversations remain haunted by her faceless image, as is this essay itself.
In our critique, our desire to contextualize the sighting of her (internal
and external) body and its broader sociopolitical implications, we seek to
conjure her face and spirit. We do not “speak for” but “speak with” her,
listening hard for her reply.18

Notes

1. This article was preceded on 1 January 2006 by an episode of the Oprah Win-
frey Show, “Wombs for Rent,” which featured a special report by reporter Lisa Ling
on the Akanksha Fertility Clinic. Many have attributed the widespread U.S. aware-
ness of and fascination with Indian transnational surrogacy to this television pro-
gram and to Oprah’s famous assertions that Indian transnational surrogacy was
“beautiful” and that it represented a situation of “women helping women.”
2. Here we are using the concept of orientalism, as discussed by Edward Said
(1978), as a process by which the “the Orient” is constructed as a cultural, political,
and social entity.
3. Most frequently, the fertilized egg carries genetic material of both the in-
tended parents. However, it might include ova donation from someone other than
the intended mother, sperm donation from someone other than the intended
father, or both.
4. For the blogs of heterosexual couples, see Amani and Bob’s Indian Surro-
gacy (http://amaniandbobsurrogacy.blogspot.com/ ), Made in India (http://152am
.blogspot.com/ ), Million Rupee Baby (http://millionrupeebaby.blogspot.com/ ), The
Switzers (http://switzertwins.wordpress.com/ ), Baby Masala (http://babymasala
.blogspot.com/ ), Cocoa Masala (http://cocoamasala.blogspot.com/ ), +1 (Make
that 2) Will Make Us a Family (http://plus1makesusafamily.blogspot.com/ ), Our
Dream to Have a Family through India Surrogacy (http://jonngem.blogspot.com/ ),
and Chai Baby (http://havingababyinindia.blogspot.com/ ). For the blogs of same-­
sex male couples, see Spawn of Mike and Mike (http://spawnofmikeandmike.blog
spot.com/ ), Two Afro Dads (http://2afrodads.blogspot.com/ ), Orea Zoi (http://orea
-­zoi.blogspot.com/ ), and From India with Love (http://johnnyanddarren.blogspot
.com/ ). The message boards we consulted were SurrogateMothersOnline and the
now defunct board run by Surrogacy India (http://www.surrogacyindia.com/ ).
5. Most message-­boarders include with their comments a “tag” that has personal
information such as “Mother to [names and ages of their children, often with the
tag ‘by surrogacy’].” Gestational surrogates were identifiable by tags such as “gsx3”
or “gs seeking ips.” Information about stillbirths and miscarriages was also in-
cluded through comments like “gs to 1 Angel Baby.”
6. Media reports describing gestational surrogacy as the “outsourcing of preg-
nancy” are too numerous to name here (two examples: Kung 2010; Subramanian

166 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

2007). Surrogacy may well be more akin to sex work, which does not require techni-
cal skill, but only the mere corporeality of the female body. As opposed to sex work,
however, surrogacy is not solely a service industry; rather, it creates a “product”—a
baby, who, when viewed through a Marxist lens, is irrevocably separated from the
worker who produced her. Ultimately, surrogates, often poor, are motivated by des-
perate economic necessity.
7. Amrita Pande (2009b) reports slightly lower numbers, such as $50,000 to
$80,000 in the United States and Canada, and between $5,000 and $12,000 in
Akanksha clinic in Anand, Gujarat.
8. DasGupta and Dasgupta 2010; Haimowitz and Sinha 2008; Pande 2009a. Un-
adulterated condemnations of surrogacy are not without complexity. The belief
that poor women in the Global South are not “free” to make choices due to the
compulsion of their poverty denies their agency and reduces them to uncompli-
cated “victims” who deserve our pity and protection. In contrast, the same lati-
tude is not necessarily offered to surrogates of the Global North, who are assumed
to exert their “free will” and to “choose” to earn money by surrogacy, and thus are
perhaps less deserving of social protection. While it might be true that some sur-
rogates in the Global South are forced into the work (Pande 2009a; DasGupta and
Dasgupta 2010), this is not the case for all (Pande 2009b; Zakaria 2010). Not unlike
their counterparts in the Global North, the majority of the women in the Global
South use their bodies for the economic advancement of their families and them-
selves (Conan 2010; DasGupta and Dasgupta 2010; Pande 2009a; Pande 2009b).
9. Indeed, recommendations about various modes of online communication be-
tween surrogates and ips has become a mini self-­help industry in and of itself. For
instance, a blog called The Next Family (http://thenextfamily.com/ ) suggests Skype,
iChat, FaceTime, blogging, emailing, and texting as ways for surrogates and ips to
stay connected.
10. See Martin 1992; Petchesky 1987; Stabile 1998; Taylor 2000; Taylor 2004;
Taylor 2008.
11. In The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram Janelle Taylor discusses a 1991 Volvo
ad that ran in Harper’s, in which there was a recognizable sonogram of a fetus with
the tag “Is something inside telling you to buy a Volvo?”
12. See Our Dream to Have a Baby through India Surrogacy (September 2010),
http://jonngem.blogspot.com/2010/09/ultrasound-­results.html.
13. It is important to frame this discussion by noting that the public fetus does
not operate the same way in all global contexts. Fetal ultrasonography is a decidedly
vexed practice in India, where ultrasounds have often been used for sex-­selective
abortion, whereby female fetuses are selectively terminated due to overwhelm-
ing cultural son preference. An estimated ten million female fetuses were aborted
in the two decades from 1980 (Boseley 2006; Dhariwal 2006), lowering the sex
ratio from 972 females to 1,000 boys at the beginning of the twentieth century to
933:1,000 by 2001 (Balakrishnan 1994; Patel 2006). In certain parts of the country,
mainly the northwest, the sex ratio dwindled at an even more alarming rate, from

Public Fetus and Veiled Woman 167

882:1,000 in 1991 to 874;1,000 by 2001 (Times of India 2009). Legislation—which
prohibits clinicians from revealing fetal sex via ultrasound—has curbed but not
halted this practice.
14. Amani and Bob’s Indian Surrogacy (Thursday April 1, 2010), http://amani
andbobsurrogacy.blogspot.com/2010/04/introducing-­our-­front-­bump.html.
15. See Amani 2010.
16. See Charliecat and John 2010.
17. The conversation about Muslim women’s agency, or lack of, vis-­à-­vis hijab
and burqua wearing, as well as the Western impetus to unveil, is rich and can be
approached through the work of Lila Abu-­Lughod, Leila Ahmed, and others. These
scholars suggest that Western justifications for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have
been tied to an impetus to unveil (and thereby “save”) Muslim women. The impli-
cation is that the concern with veiling is not so much about freedom for women
as it is about the inhibition of the misogynist and colonial proprietary gaze. This is
similar to Frantz Fanon’s (1965) argument that the French were concerned with the
unveiling of Algerian women not because they cared about women’s freedom, but
because it inhibited their proprietal gaze.
18. For more on the complexities of “speaking for” vs. “speaking with” subaltern
subjects, see Spivak 2007.

168 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta

 9
RACE, GENDER, AND
GENETIC TECHNOLOGIES
A New Reproductive Dystopia?

D O R O T H Y E . R O B E RT S

In the 1980s Margaret Atwood, Gena Corea, and other feminists imag-
ined dystopias in which white women’s reproduction was valued and
privileged and the reproduction of women of color was devalued and ex-
ploited. In The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, Atwood envisioned the
repressive Republic of Gilead, where handmaids were forced to serve as
breeders for elite men and their infertile wives in order to perpetuate the
white race, while blacks, as well as handmaids who failed to bear children,
were exiled to toxic colonies. That same year, in The Mother Machine, Corea
predicted that white women would hire surrogates of color in reproduc-
tive brothels to be implanted with their eggs and to gestate their babies
at low cost.
Three decades later, feminist scholars have continued to critique the
hierarchy that the anthropologist Rayna Rapp aptly calls “stratified re-
production” by contrasting the opposing relationships of white women
and women of color to reproduction-­assisting technologies (1999, 310).
At the turn of the twenty-­first century, even more advanced reproduc-
tive technologies that combine assisted conception with genetic selec-
tion, or reprogenetics, threaten to intensify this opposition (Parens and
Knowles 2007; Roberts 2005). With preimplantation genetic diagnosis
(pgd), clinicians can biopsy a single cell from early embryos, diagnose
it for the chance of having hundreds of genetic conditions, and select for
implantation only those embryos at low risk of having these conditions
(J. A. Robertson 2003; Singer 2007; Spar 2006). As Reprogenetics, a New
Jersey genetics laboratory that specializes in pgd, puts it, this technique
allows for the “replacement to the patient of those embryos classified by
genetic diagnosis as normal.”1
At a time when wealthy white women have access to technologies that
assist them in having children who not only are genetically related to
them or their partners but have also been genetically screened, various
laws and policies discourage women of color from having children at all
(Roberts 1998; A. M. Smith 2007). As Rapp stated at a Radcliffe Institute
conference, “Reproductive Health in the Twenty-­first Century,” in Octo-
ber 2004, “Some women struggle for basic reproductive technologies, like
a clinic where sterile conditions might be available to perform C-­sections,
while others turn to cutting-­edge genetic techniques” (quoted in Drex-
ler 2005). The African American studies scholar Marsha Darling similarly
writes, “This stunning array of biotechnology is being directed at develop-
ing eugenical population control strategies especially for low-­income and
poor women of color globally,” while “reproduction enhancement options
under the rubric of ‘choice’ ” are reserved “for economically and racially
privileged women in the global North” (2004).
While welfare-­reform laws aim to deter women receiving public assis-
tance from having even one additional healthy baby, largely unregulated
fertility clinics regularly implant privileged women with multiple em-
bryos, despite knowing the high-­risk multiple births pose for premature
delivery and low birth weight.2 The public begrudges poor mothers a mea-
ger increase in benefits for one more child, but it celebrates the birth of
high-­tech septuplets that require a fortune in publicly supported hospital
care (Andrews 1999, 55–61). The multibillion-­dollar apparatus devoted to
technologically facilitating affluent couples’ procreative decisions stands
in glaring contrast to the high rate of infant death among black people,
which remains more than twice the rate for whites (Mathews and Mac-
Dorman 2007). Indeed, the infant mortality rate is climbing in Missis-
sippi and other Southern states (Eckholm 2007).
My prior writing on this reproductive caste system also contrasted
policies that penalize poor black women’s childbearing with the high-­
tech fertility industry that promotes childbearing by more affluent white
women (Roberts 1998, 246–93). I recently reconsidered the positioning
of white women and women of color in the reproductive hierarchy, how-

170 Dorothy E. Roberts
ever (Roberts 2005). Rather than place these women in opposition, I tied
them together in relation to the neoliberal trend toward privatization
and punitive governance. Both population-­control programs and genetic-­
selection technologies reinforce biological explanations for social prob-
lems and place reproductive responsibility on women, thus privatizing
remedies for illness and social inequity.
Population-­control ideology attributes social inequities to childbear-
ing by poor women of color, thereby legitimizing punitive regulation
of these women’s reproductive decisions (Roberts 1998). Stereotypes of
black female sexual and reproductive irresponsibility support welfare-­
reform and law-­enforcement policies that severely regulate poor black
women’s sexual and childbearing decisions (Neubeck 2001). By identify-
ing procreation as the cause of deplorable social conditions, reproduc-
tive punishments divert attention away from state responsibility and the
need for social change. Black mothers’ crack use, for example, became a
primary explanation for high rates of black infant mortality, although
this disparity long predated the crack epidemic.3
Like punishments for poor women’s childbearing, reprogenetics also
shifts responsibility for promoting well-­being from the government to
the individual by making women responsible for ensuring the genetic fit-
ness of their children. The individual woman becomes the site of gover-
nance through self-­regulation of genetic risk (Mykitiuk 2000). The medi-
cal model of disability that promotes eugenic elimination of genetic risk
instead of ending discrimination against disabled people supports state
reliance on individuals to secure their own well-­being through the use of
genetic technologies. This diversion of attention away from social causes
and solutions reinforces privatization, the hallmark of a neoliberal state
that seeks to reduce social-­welfare programs while promoting the free-­
market conditions conducive to capital accumulation. Thus, reproductive-­
health policies involving women at opposite ends of the reproductive
hierarchy play an important role in the neoliberal state’s transfer of ser-
vices from the welfare state to the private realm of family and market.
In the last several years, while working on a book project exploring the
growth of biotechnologies that incorporate race as a genetic category, I
have come to reconsider once again the opposition of white women and
women of color in the reproductive caste system in relation to reproduc-
tive technologies. The position I just described, like the 1980s reproductive
dystopias, still casts white women as the only consumers of reproductive
technologies and women of color only as victims of population-­control

Race, Gender, Genetic Technologies 171

policies. It assumes that white women are the only ones with access to
these technologies and those women of color play no part in the politics
of reprogenetics, except by their exclusion or exploitation.
The recent expansion of both reproductive genetic screening and race-­
based biomedicine, however, signals a dramatic change in the racial poli-
tics of reproductive technologies. First, the important role of genetic
screening, which makes individual citizens responsible for ensuring good
health by reducing genetic risk, may support the wider incorporation of
reprogenetic technologies into the neoliberal health-­care system. Sec-
ond, companies that market race-­based biotechnologies now promise to
extend the benefits of genetic research to people of color (Bloche 2004;
Kahn 2007). Media promoting genetic technologies prominently feature
people of color in images representing the new genetic age, in contrast
to prior portrayals that emphasized whiteness as the exclusive standard
of genetic fitness.4 Moreover, some clinics that offer high-­tech reproduc-
tive services, including pgd, explicitly appeal to clients of color.5 Women
of color are now part of the market and cultural imaginary of the new re-
progenetics. We need a new reproductive dystopia that accounts for the
changing racial politics of genetics and reproduction.
In this essay I critically explore the role of race and racism in the emer-
gence of reproductive technologies that incorporate advances in genetic
science. What are the implications of including women of color in the
market for reprogenetic technologies, particularly when this is done with
the expectation that women will use these technologies to manage ge-
netic risk? In investigating this question, I hope to shed light on the criti-
cal relationship between racism, neoliberalism, and reproduction.

Expanding the Market for Reproductive Technologies

In Killing the Black Body, I discussed the role of race in images promoting
the fertility industry (Roberts 1998, 251). I pointed out that pictures
showing the success of reproduction-­assisting technologies were always
of white babies, usually with blond hair and blue eyes, as if to highlight
their racial purity. When the New York Times launched a prominent four-­
article series called “The Fertility Market” in January 1996, for example,
the front page displayed a photograph of the director of a fertility clinic
surrounded by seven white children conceived there (T. Gabriel 1996, A1).
The continuing page contained a picture of a set of beaming in vitro fer-
tilization (ivf) triplets, also white (ibid., A18).

172 Dorothy E. Roberts
 In the 1990s the only time black babies figured in media coverage of
these technologies was in stories intended to evoke revulsion precisely be-
cause of their race. One instance was a highly publicized lawsuit brought
by a white woman against a fertility clinic she claimed had mistakenly in-
seminated her with a black man’s sperm, resulting in the birth of a mixed-­
race child (Schatz 1990; Sullivan 1990). Two reporters covering the story
speculated, “If the suit goes to trial, a jury could be faced with the difficult
task of deciding damages involved in raising an interracial child” (Kantro-
witz and Kaplan 1990). The perceived harm to the mother of receiving the
wrong sperm was intensified by the clinic’s failure to deliver a white baby.
Other notorious news stories from the 1990s included the case of twin
boys born to a white Dutch couple who discovered when the babies were
two months old that one was white and one was black (Elliot and Endt
1995). The fertility clinic had fertilized the mother’s eggs with sperm from
both her white husband and a black man. A landmark California dispute
from 1993, Johnson v. Calvert, involved a black gestational “surrogate,”
Anna Johnson, who was denied any rights to the child she bore for the
genetic parents, a white man and his Filipina wife, Mark and Crispina
Calvert.6 The press paid far more attention to Anna Johnson’s race than to
that of Crispina Calvert. It also portrayed the baby as white. By relying on
the Calverts’ genetic tie to the child to determine legal parenthood, the
California courts ensured that a black woman would not be considered
the natural mother of a white child (Roberts 1998, 280–81). While the
stories involving whites portrayed the positive potential of new repro-
ductive technologies, the stories involving women and children of color
revealed their potential horror.
Today, however, the high-­tech fertility business, including genetic-­
screening services, no longer appeals to an exclusively white clientele.
Although fertility clinics perform sex selection for a range of clients, the
controversy surrounding this service has centered on Chinese and Indian
women (Bumgarner 2007; Darnovsky 2004). Images on fertility clinic
websites routinely show people of color alongside claims advertising
clinic services and their benefits. To be sure, pictures of white babies con-
tinue to dominate some websites. The home page of the Rinehart Center
for Reproductive Medicine, in Illinois, displays the head of a blond-­haired
baby emerging like the sun from billowing white clouds to illustrate its
promise of “turning your dreams of starting a family into reality.”7 Sher
Institutes for Reproductive Medicine, with nationwide locations, streams
photo strips of its “success stories,” showing dozens of children, all of

Race, Gender, Genetic Technologies 173

whom appear to be white.8 Similarly, a full-­page advertisement for the
Virginia-­based Genetics and ivf Institute, which recently appeared in
the New York Times Magazine, features a giant photo (covering about a
half page) of a white baby with blond hair, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks.9
The headline asks, “Over 40 and Thinking of Having a Baby?” followed
by the solution: “donor egg Immediate Availability.” In the text below,
the company boasts of offering “Doctoral Donors with advanced degrees
and numerous other donors with special accomplishments and talents.”
The assumption that whiteness, intelligence, and talent are connected
and hereditary remains robust in the reprogenetic marketplace.
Nevertheless, the images associated with reproductive technologies
have dramatically diversified in recent years. Reproductive Health Spe-
cialists, in Illinois, displays a photograph of a large group of white couples
holding white babies, captioned “Baby Picnic.”10 But its website also con-
tains a photograph of a smiling black man and woman and a drawing of
a pregnant black woman attended to by a black male partner and female
physician. Likewise, Houston ivf’s website shows a beaming black couple
holding a black baby.11 The Illinois-­based Karande and Associates takes a
very multicultural approach, displaying a photo of a pregnant East Asian
woman on the page for scheduling an appointment, a black woman and
child for its link to donor egg information, and a South Asian man and
child for the insurance information link.12 There are numerous adver-
tisements on Craigslist.org explicitly soliciting egg donors of color. Simi-
larly, Pacific Fertility Center boasts that it “maintains a diverse egg donor
database including Jewish egg donors, Asian egg donors, and a variety of
backgrounds and ethnicities.”13
Some fertility clinic websites not only market their reprogenetic ser-
vices to people of color, but they also perform race-­based genetic testing
as part of those services. Pacific Fertility Center’s website includes the
statement “Genetic screening is also recommended, based on ethnic back-
ground.”14 Reproductive Genetics Institute, in Chicago, similarly includes
race in the factors it takes into account in its genetic testing: “Screening
Results and Accuracy: By combining the results of the ultrasound and
blood test along with the age, race and weight of the mother, a number
can be generated by computer which represents the risk of the pregnancy
being affected by Down syndrome or another chromosome problem. Ex-
perience has shown that, together, the ultrasound and blood screen will
identify approximately 90% of babies with chromosome abnormalities.”15
Fertility clinics’ use of race in genetic selection procedures may help

174 Dorothy E. Roberts
to reinforce the erroneous belief that race is a biological classification
that can be determined genetically or that genetic traits occur in human
beings according to their race. Social scientists’ demonstration that race is
an invented social grouping was confirmed by genomic studies of human
variation, including the Human Genome Project, showing high levels of
genetic similarity among people of all races (Cooper, Kaufman, and Ward
2003; Graves 2001). At the onset of the Human Genome Project, some
scholars believed that the science of human genetic diversity would re-
place race as the preeminent means of grouping people for scientific pur-
poses (Lewontin 1995; Reardon 2005). Yet the use of race as a biological
category in genetic research and biotechnology is intensifying.16
The marketing of high-­tech reproductive services to women of color is
part of a broader inclusion of minority groups in the testing and produc-
tion of cutting-­edge biotechnologies. In June 2005 the Food and Drug Ad-
ministration (fda) approved the first race-­based pharmaceutical, BiDil,
to treat heart failure specifically in African American patients (Saul 2005).
BiDil is the combination of two generic drugs that doctors were already
prescribing regardless of race. Yet the fda permitted its maker, Nitro-
Med, to market BiDil as a drug for black people. Making BiDil race spe-
cific also allowed NitroMed to extend its patent to the year 2020, giving
the company market exclusivity and the potential to reap huge profits on
drug sales (Kahn 2004). The manufacturer’s unproven theory supporting
the need for a race-­specific therapy is that the reason for higher mortality
rates among black heart patients lies in genetic differences among “races,”
either in the reason for getting heart disease or in the reason for respond-
ing differently to the medications used to treat heart disease (Kahn 2004;
Sankar and Kahn 2005).
BiDil is only one example of the growing trend toward “the strategic
use of race as a genetic category to obtain patent protection and drug
approval” (Kahn 2006, 1349). In his survey of gene-­related patent appli-
cations, the legal scholar Jonathan Kahn (2006) discovered that the use
of race has increased fivefold in the past twenty years. Claims about jus-
tice in scientific research have shifted away from protecting socially dis-
advantaged subjects from unethical practices and toward promoting ac-
cess to clinical trials and biotech products (Epstein 2007). There is strong
support for racial therapeutics among some black advocates, researchers,
and physicians precisely to redress past discrimination and fulfill long-­
standing demands for science to attend to the health needs of African
Americans (Puckrein 2006; see also Roberts 2008). This increased com-

Race, Gender, Genetic Technologies 175

mercial and popular demand for race-­specific pharmaceuticals threatens
to reinforce a false belief in the biological origin of race.
Advanced reproductive technologies similarly constitute a form of
race-­based medicine. Rather than serve an exclusively white clientele, fer-
tility clinics are marketing genetic technologies to women of color on the
basis of race and ethnicity, and incorporating race in genetic-­screening
procedures. Contemporary reproductive dystopias, then, should not cate-
gorically exclude women of color from their imagined users of genetic
selection technologies. The expansion of race-­based biotechnology, in-
cluding genetic selection, fits within the neoliberal trend toward priva-
tization and punitive governance, and requires adjusting feminist repro-
ductive dystopias.

Neoliberalism and Reproductive Dystopia

The marketing of reprogenetics to women of color is taking place in the

context of neoliberal shifts in governance that may encourage the expan-
sion of genetic-­screening technologies to a broader clientele. Widespread
prenatal testing has already generated greater surveillance of pregnant
women and assigned them primary responsibility for making the “right”
genetic decisions. It is increasingly routine for pregnant women to get
prenatal diagnoses for certain genetic conditions, such as Down syn-
drome or dwarfism (Powell 2007; Saxton 2007). It is also often expected
that they will opt for abortion to select against any disabling traits iden-
tified by genetic testing. Many obstetricians provide these tests without
much explanation or deliberation because they consider such screenings
to be a normal part of treating their pregnant patients. The director of re-
productive genetics at a large Detroit hospital reported that at least half
of the women referred there with an abnormal amniocentesis result were
“uncertain about why they even had the test” (Consumers Union 1990,
486). Moreover, current tort case law creates incentives in favor of ge-
netic testing by imposing legal duties on obstetricians to offer it (Ossorio
2007, 330; Weil 2006, 52). While there are virtually no legal consequences
for doctors who encourage genetic tests, doctors who fail to use them may
be liable for damages in “wrongful birth” lawsuits.17
Although genetic counseling should be nondirective, many coun-
selors show disapproval when patients decide against selective abor-
tion. A genetic counselor asked a woman who decided to bear a child
with Down syndrome, “What are you going to say to people when they

176 Dorothy E. Roberts
ask you how you could bring a child like this into the world?” (quoted in
Helm, Miranda, and Chedd 1998, 59). Brian Skotko’s (2005) survey of 985
mothers who received postnatal diagnoses of Down syndrome for their
children similarly discovered that many of the mothers were chastised
by health-­care professionals for not undergoing prenatal testing: “Right
after [my child] was born, the doctor flat out told my husband that this
could have been prevented or discontinued at an earlier stage of the preg-
nancy,” wrote one mother who had a child with Down syndrome in 2000.
A mother who had a child in 1993 recalled, “I had a resident in the re-
covery room when I learned that my daughter had ds [Down syndrome].
When I started to cry, I overheard him say, ‘What did she expect? She re-
fused prenatal testing.’ ” Another mother reported, from her experience
in 1997, “The attending neonatologist, rather than extending some form
of compassion, lambasted us for our ignorance in not doing prior testing
and for bringing this burden to society—noting the economical, educa-
tional, and social hardships he [the child] would bring.” Regarding a post-
natal visit, a mother who had a child in 1992 wrote, “[My doctor] stressed
‘next time’ the need for amniocentesis so that I could ‘choose to termi-
nate’” (Skotko 2005, 70–71). As a result of such pressure, many pregnant
women now view genetic testing as a requirement of responsible mother-
ing (Harmon 2007).
Poor women, especially women of color, currently face financial and
other barriers to receiving high-­tech infertility services (Elster 2005). Be-
cause genetic screening is now considered an essential part of preven-
tive medicine, however, these technologies are becoming integrated into
social-­welfare systems and private-­insurance schemes and are likely to
become increasingly available to poor and low-­income women (K. Bu-
miller 2009; van den Daele 2006).18 Unlike ivf, whose primary purpose is
to increase fertility, pgd functions to help women avoid starting a preg-
nancy that entails disfavored genetic traits (Franklin and Roberts 2006,
xx, 97).19 The aim of ivf is to produce the birth of a live baby; the aim of
pgd and fetal diagnosis is to prevent the birth of certain children. While
government welfare systems have disdained facilitating childbearing by
poor women of color by declining to fund fertility treatments, they may
therefore treat genetic testing differently.
The current ban on federal funding of abortion places a significant limit
on state genetic selection programs (Powell 2007, 49–50). In states that
do not provide Medicaid funding for abortion, poor women can receive
state-­sponsored genetic testing but have to pay for the cost of selective

Race, Gender, Genetic Technologies 177

abortions themselves. Yet it is not hard to foresee future federal and state
legislation that exempts “therapeutic” abortions based on genetic testing
from the ban on abortion funding. Prior to the 1973 Supreme Court deci-
sion Roe v. Wade, which upheld the constitutional right to abortion, many
states permitted therapeutic abortions recommended by physicians while
criminalizing elective abortions sought by women with unwanted preg-
nancies (Schoen 2005, 153–86).
Indeed, some clients of reprogenetics have claimed moral superiority
over women who have had abortions for nonselective reasons. In an op-­
ed piece in the New York Times, Barbara Ehrenreich (2004) calls on women
who have aborted fetuses based on prenatal diagnosis to support the gen-
eral right to abortion. She notes that these women sometimes distinguish
themselves from women who have “ordinary” abortions. One woman who
aborted a fetus with Down syndrome states, “I don’t look at it as though
I had an abortion, even though that is technically what it is. There’s a
difference. I wanted this baby” (quoted in Ehrenreich 2004, A21). On a
website for a support group called “A Heart Breaking Choice” a mother
who went to an abortion clinic complains, “I resented the fact that I had
to be there with all these girls that did not want their babies” (quoted in
ibid.). The incorporation of eugenic values in arguments for women’s re-
productive freedom neglects the history of abortion regulation, which
limited women’s reproductive freedom by distinguishing between ap-
proved therapeutic and disapproved elective abortions. An attempt to
solicit supporters of selective abortion to join the cause of abortion rights
misunderstands the nature of reproductive politics in the neoliberal age.
The expansion of genetic research and technologies has helped to create
a new biological citizenship that enlists patients to take unprecedented
authority over their health at the molecular level (Rose 2007). Accord-
ing to the British sociologist Nikolas Rose, “Our very biological life itself
has entered the domain of decision and choice” (2007, 40). Some schol-
ars have highlighted the enhancement of human agency, as “patients are
increasingly urged to become active and responsible consumers of medi-
cal services and products ranging from pharmaceuticals to reproductive
technologies and genetic tests” (ibid., 4) and to form alliances with physi-
cians, scientists, and clinicians to advocate for their interests (Franklin
and Roberts 2006, xvii).
Biological citizenship also reflects the shift of responsibility for public
welfare from the state to the private realms of market and family. As Rose
observes, responsibility for the management of health and reproduction

178 Dorothy E. Roberts
has devolved from the “formal apparatus of the government” to “quasi-­
autonomous regulatory bodies” such as bioethics commissions, profes-
sional groups, and private corporations (2007, 3). Selling genetic testing
products directly to consumers is big business for private fertility clinics
and biotechnology companies. Biomedical research and technology have
correspondingly become major sources of capital accumulation, aided by
federal patents on genetic information, fda approval of pharmaceuticals,
and public funding of lucrative private research ventures, such as Califor-
nia’s stem-­cell research initiative.
In this neoliberal context, genetic testing serves as a form of priva-
tization that makes the individual the site of governance through the
self-­regulation of genetic risk (Mykitiuk 2000). Reproductive genetic
technologies, in particular, introduce a new gendered division of labor
and surveillance as women bear the brunt of reprogenetics’ contribu-
tion to the neoliberal restructuring of health care (ibid.). The Canadian
legal scholar Roxanne Mykitiuk (2000) points out that, contrary to the
deregulation that typically occurs in the service of big business, the new
duties imposed on women constitute a reregulation that supports capital
investment in market-­based approaches to health care and other social
needs while state investment in public resources shrinks.
In addition, reprogenetics incorporates a seemingly benign form of
eugenic thinking in its reliance on reproductive strategies to eliminate
genetic risk rather than on social strategies to eliminate systemic inequi-
ties. Some disability-­rights advocates oppose prenatal genetic diagnosis
that leads to discarding embryos and fetuses predicted to have disabili-
ties because these procedures devalue people who have disabilities, send-
ing the message that they should never have been born.20 They argue that
although disabilities cause various degrees of impairment, the main diffi-
culty in having a disability stems from pervasive discrimination. “Rather
than improving the medical or social situation of today’s and tomorrow’s
disabled citizens,” write the bioethicists Erik Parens and Adrienne Asch,
“prenatal diagnosis reenforces the medical model that disability itself,
not societal discrimination against people with disabilities, is the prob-
lem to be solved” (2007, 13).
The reasons why some parents do not want a disabled child are varied.
While some women may use genetic selection in an upwardly mobile
quest for the “perfect child,” others want to prevent their children from
suffering the pain, illness, and physical limitations that accompany dis-
abilities or worry that they are not capable of dealing with disability’s

Race, Gender, Genetic Technologies 179

social consequences.21 Yet given medical professionals’ implicit directive
favoring genetic selection and powerful stereotypes that negatively de-
pict disabled people, many women are left with a false impression of the
nature of parenting a disabled child and the quality of disabled people’s
lives (which genetic testing cannot predict [K. Bumiller 2009]). Pregnant
women are rarely able to make truly informed decisions about what to
do with test results because they, obstetricians, and counselors typically
have little information about the lives of disabled people and their fami-
lies (Parens and Asch 2007, 33–37; Wendell 1996, 81–84).22
Moreover, some of the undesirable events likely to happen to a child
with a serious disability that parents may reasonably wish to prevent,
such as limited educational and employment opportunities are caused by
social as much as physical impediments (Steinbock 2007, 119). Unable to
count on societal acceptance or support, many women feel compelled to
turn to genetic testing to ensure their children’s welfare (Kittay 2007, 181;
Lippman 1991, 39). Without judging the morality of individual women’s
decisions, we must critically evaluate the social, political, and legal in-
centives for genetic testing as well as consequences of genetic testing for
people with disabilities. Building on the disability critique, we must also
question the role that the eugenic approach to disability plays in neolib-
eral governance.
Rose, the British sociologist, rejects critical intellectuals’ use of eugen-
ics rhetoric to contest pgd and other aspects of contemporary biological
politics (2007, 54–68). He argues that the eugenics practiced in the first
half of the twentieth century was a particular biopolitical strategy that
sought to improve the population as a whole through deliberate state
action. This effort “to control the biological makeup of the population”
as a whole, he claims, distinguishes eugenics from the new biopolitics’
concern with the genetic health of individuals (ibid., 56). “What we have
here, then, is not eugenics but is shaped by forms of self-­government
imposed by obligations of choice, the desire for self-­fulfillment, and the
wish of parents for the best lives for their children” (ibid., 69). Rose dis-
misses the relevance of eugenics to contemporary biopolitics too cate-
gorically. He downplays critical aspects of the past eugenics regime that
characterize both contemporary population-­control policies and genetic-­
screening technologies such as pgd. By eugenic thinking or values, I refer
to the belief that reproductive strategies can improve society by reducing
the births of socially marginalized people. The eugenic approach to social
problems locates them in reproduction rather than in social structure and

180 Dorothy E. Roberts
therefore seeks to solve them by eliminating disfavored people instead
of social inequities. Its chief epistemological device is to make the social
order seem natural by casting its features as biological facts. As Donald A.
MacKenzie observes, eugenic theory is “a way of reading the structure of
social classes onto nature” (1981, 18). Programs based on such a belief set
up standards for reproduction that subsume childbearing under prevail-
ing hierarchies of power.
Eugenics did not function only “in the service of a biological struggle
between nation-­states” (Rose 2007, 66); it functioned to maintain the
racial, gender, and class order within the nation. (Moreover, alliances be-
tween American and Nazi eugenicists in the 1930s show a willingness
to cross national boundaries in the interest of white supremacy.)23 Thus,
contemporary proposals to solve social problems by curbing black repro-
duction—such as the Philadelphia Inquirer’s suggestion to distribute the
long-­acting contraceptive Norplant as a remedy for black poverty (Kimel-
man 1990)—are similar to past eugenic policies in that they make racial
inequality appear to be the product of nature rather than power. By iden-
tifying procreation as the cause of black people’s condition, they divert
attention away from the political, social, and economic forces that main-
tain the U.S. racial order. I therefore believe it is accurate and helpful to
identify the ways in which contemporary reproductive-­health policies in-
corporate essential features of eugenic ideology, despite the important
differences that Rose highlights.
Futhermore, the distinction between past state-­imposed and current
voluntary programs is not as clear-­cut as Rose suggests. On the one hand,
Rose ignores the system of punitive governance that accompanies the
neoliberal shift to individual self-­governance. Welfare is no longer a sys-
tem of aid, but rather a system of behavior modification that attempts
to regulate the sexual, marital, and childbearing decisions of poor un-
married mothers by placing conditions on the receipt of state assistance
(Mink 2002; Roberts 1998; A. M. Smith 2007). Meanwhile, federal and
state governments aggressively intervene in marginalized communities
to manage their social deprivation with especially punitive measures. The
U.S. prison population has grown to proportions unprecedented in the
history of Western democracies, as an astounding number of young black
men are locked up (Garland 2001; Sentencing Project 2005). The racial dis-
parity in the foster-­care population mirrors that of the prison system, as
child-­protection authorities remove grossly disproportionate numbers of
black children from their homes (Roberts 2002). Population-­control poli-

Race, Gender, Genetic Technologies 181

cies that attribute social inequities to the childbearing of poor minority
women are a critical component of this punitive trend away from state
support for families and communities (Roberts 1998; A. M. Smith 2007).
Rose’s reference to “the enabling state, the facilitating state, the state as
animator” (2007, 63) does not apply to policies designed to penalize child-
bearing by poor women and women of color.
On the other hand, Rose’s focus on state direction of twentieth-­century
eugenic programs obscures the crucial role of private enterprises in dis-
seminating and implementing eugenics. Just as influential as the manda-
tory sterilization laws passed in most states were the campaigns waged by
private groups such as the American Eugenics Society, the Human Better-
ment Association, and the American Genetics Association to educate the
American public about the benefits of eugenics, as well as the American
Birth Control League’s programs to distribute birth control to the unfit
(Kevles 1985). As Rose acknowledges, “Eugenics was not disreputable or
marginal: it defined one dimension of mainstream thinking about the re-
sponsibilities of politicians, professionals, scientists, and individuals in
the modern world” (2007, 59).
Some feminists who use eugenics rhetoric to critique modern genetic-­
selection technologies explicitly acknowledge the distinction between
state-­imposed programs and private decisions made by individuals. For
example, the U.S. sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman (2001) calls the mar-
keting of prenatal diagnostic technologies a form of microeugenics, fo-
cused on the individual, in contrast to macroeugenics, focused on popu-
lations. I also explicitly distinguish between population-­control policies
and those that promote reprogenetics while drawing attention to their
common support of neoliberal approaches to social inequities (Roberts
2005). This distinction, however, should not eclipse the coercive nature
and social function of contemporary reprogenetics (Ward 2002; Wendell
1996, 156). Genetic-­selection procedures are increasingly treated as social
responsibilities reinforced not only by cultural expectations but also by
legal penalties and incentives. Does the state-­supported reproductive-­
genetics industry exist only to give individual citizens more reproduc-
tive choices, or, as Laura Hershey asks, is it “primarily for the benefit of a
society unwilling to support disability-­related needs?” (1994, 31; see also
Wendell 1996, 154).
Rose’s analysis of contemporary biopolitics helps to illuminate the
radical change from state management of the population’s health to indi-
vidual management of genetic risk, aided by new genetic technologies.

182 Dorothy E. Roberts
These technologies facilitate the shift from state responsibility for ensur-
ing health and welfare to private responsibility, all within the context of
persistent race, gender, and class inequities; devastating reductions in
social programs; and intense state surveillance of marginalized commu-
nities. Genetic screening is increasingly recommended not only to avoid
having children with serious early onset disabilities or diseases with a
high likelihood of occurring, but also to eliminate the risk of developing
certain diseases as an adult (Obasogie 2006). A recent article in the Jour-
nal of the American Medical Association, for example, encouraged families
affected by hereditary cancer syndromes, including breast, ovarian, and
colon cancer, to use pgd to screen out embryos genetically predisposed to
develop cancer (Offit, Sagi, and Hurley 2006). In the neoliberal future, the
state may rely on the expectation that all pregnant women will undergo
genetic testing to legitimize not only its refusal to support the care of dis-
abled children but also its denial of broader claims for public provision
of health care.

Extending Choice to Women of Color

The role reprogenetics plays in neoliberalism’s integrated system of priva-

tization and punitive governance is obscured by liberal notions of repro-
ductive choice. Despite the potential for reprogenetics to diminish public
health care and intensify regulation of women’s reproductive decisions,
its sponsors often defend the industry’s immunity from state regulation
in the name of women’s reproductive freedom (Rothman 1989, 116; Dar-
ling 2004). Extending the availability of genetic-­selection technologies to
women of color does not correct the role played by reprogenetics in ad-
vancing a neoliberal agenda. The depletion of public resources for general
health care and for supporting people with disabilities would exacerbate
economic inequities along racial lines, hitting poor minority communities
the hardest. In addition, the expectation of genetic self-­regulation may
fall especially harshly on black and Latina women, who are stereotypically
defined as lacking the capacity for self-­control. The use of high-­tech, ex-
pensive technologies by a privileged slice of women of color suggests that
those who do not use them for financial, social, or ethical reasons may be
blamed for the social consequences.
There may always be certain reproductive technologies that are re-
served for the wealthiest people and are outside the reach of most women
of color. The market will privilege a tiny elite among people of color who

Race, Gender, Genetic Technologies 183

can afford high-­tech reproductive innovations while relegating the vast
majority to the state’s most intense reproductive surveillance. Indeed,
the neoliberal reification of market logic is likely to expand the hiring of
poor and low-­income women of color for their reproductive services. The
incidence of payments to these women to gestate fetuses or to produce
eggs for genetic research could intensify (Haworth 2007) even as they
are encouraged to use genetic technologies to screen their own children.
In addition, marketing race-­based biotechnologies to consumers of
color can reinforce the biological meaning of race. By incorporating in-
vented racial categories into genetic research, scientists and entrepre-
neurs are producing biotechnologies that validate people’s belief that
race is a natural classification. A renewed trust in inherent racial differ-
ences provides an alternative explanation for persistent gross inequities
in blacks’ health and welfare despite the end of de jure discrimination.
These technologies promote the view that deepening racial inequities
that result from neoliberal policies are actually caused by genetic differ-
ences between whites and other racialized groups. The biological expla-
nation for racial disparities provides a ready logic for the staggering dis-
enfranchisement of people of color through mass incarceration and other
punitive policies, as well as the perfect complement to color-­blind policies
implementing the claim that racism has ceased to be the cause of their
predicament. Including women of color in the market for reprogenetic
technologies does not eradicate the racial caste system underlying repro-
ductive stratification.
A reproductive dystopia for the twenty-­first century could no longer ex-
clude women of color from the market for high-­tech reprogenetics. Rather,
it would take place in a society in which racial and economic divisions are
reinforced by the genetic testing extended to them. In this new dysto-
pia, the biological definition of race is stronger than ever, validated by ge-
netic science and cemented in popular culture by race-­based biotechnolo-
gies. The state has disclaimed all responsibility for supporting its citizens,
placing the duty of ensuring public welfare in all women’s self-­regulation
of genetic risk. The medical model of disability is embedded in a neolib-
eral health policy that relies on widespread use of genetic technologies to
disqualify citizens from claiming public support and to avoid the need for
social change. The new biologization of race may seem to unite blacks, and
other nonwhite “races,” by confirming the genetic uniformity of people
belonging to the same race and their genetic difference from others. In
the new dystopia, however, genetic-­selection technologies that incorpo-

184 Dorothy E. Roberts
rate race as a biological category reinforce class divisions between elite
people of color who can afford the full array of high-­tech procedures and
the masses who suffer most from neoliberal policies bolstered by these
very biological explanations of racial inequities. But I can also imagine a
new utopia arising from feminists’ radical resistance to enlisting women
as genetic screeners in service of a neoliberal agenda, a resistance that
is emboldened by new alliances—joining reproductive-­justice with anti-
racist, disability-­rights, and economic-­justice movements that recognize
their common interest in contesting a race-­based reprogenetic future.

Notes

Dorothy E. Roberts’s chapter, “Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Re-
productive Dystopia?,” was previously printed in Signs 34, no. 4 (summer 2009):
783–804. Copyright University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission of the
publisher.
1. See the Reprogenetics website, http://www.reprogenetics.com.
2. On welfare-­reform laws, see Mink 2002; A. M. Smith 2007. On unregulated
fertility clinics, see Arons 2007, 1; Parens and Knowles 2007. On implanting privi-
leged women with multiple embryos despite knowing the risks, see Helmerhorst
et al. 2004; Mundy 2007; Reddy et al. 2007.
3. See McCaughey 2005; Roberts 1998, 154–59; Zerai and Banks 2002.
4. See the websites of dna Tribes (http://www.dnatribes.com), GeneTree (http://
www.genetree.com), and National Geographic’s Genographic Project (https://
genographic.nationalgeographic.com).
5. See the Pacific Fertility Center’s appeal to prospective donors at the Egg
Donor Agency website (http://www.pfcdonoragency.com/egg-­donor/egg-­donor
-­agency) and information about egg donation at http://www.pacificfertilitycenter
.com/treat/agency_donation.php.
6. Johnson v. Calvert, 5 Cal. 4th 84, 19 Cal. Rptr. 494 (1993), cert. denied, 114
S. Ct. 206 (1993).
7. See the Rinehart Center for Reproductive Medicine website, http://www
.reproductivemedicineinstitute.com/.
8. See the Sher Institutes for Reproductive Medicine website, http://haveababy
.com/.
9. See Genetics and ivf Institute, advertisement, New York Times Magazine, 29
July 2007, 21.
10. See images of the “baby picnic” at http://ivfplus.net/baby_party.htm.
11. See the Houston ivf website, http://www.houstonivf.net/Home.aspx?key
word=houston%20ivf&gclid=CNCdpL6F5MACFQypaQodhKwANw.
12. For images from the Karande and Associates website, see http://www.invia
fertility.com/.

Race, Gender, Genetic Technologies 185

 13. See the Pacific Fertility Center’s appeal to prospective donors at http://www
.donateyoureggs.com.
14. See the Pacific Fertility Center website, http://www.pacificfertilitycenter
.com/Treat/agency_donation.php.
15. See the Reproductive Genetics Institute’s webpage on first-­trimester screen-
ing, http://www.reproductivegenetics.com/.
16. See Bonham, Warshauer-­Baker, and Collins 2005; Burchard et al. 2003;
Duster 2005.
17. For example, the Supreme Court of Ohio recently held that parents of an un-
healthy child born following negligent failure to diagnose a fetal defect or disease
may bring suit under traditional medical malpractice principles for the costs arising
from the pregnancy and birth of the child. See Schirmer v. Mt. Auburn Obstetrics
and Gynecologic Associates, Inc., 108 Ohio St. 3d 494, 2006-­Ohio-­942 (Ohio S. Ct.
2006). For an argument in favor of using tort law to compensate for “procreative
injury” caused by reproduction assisting technologies, see Kleinfeld 2005.
18. For an extensive review of insurance coverage of infertility treatments, see
Arons 2007, 8–13: “Fourteen states currently require some types of health insur-
ance plans to include coverage of certain infertility services or to make such cover-
age available” (8).
19. pgd also serves to increase fertility when it is undertaken to improve ivf
success rates (Franklin and Roberts 2006, 97).
20. See Parens and Asch 2007; Saxton 2007; Wendell 1996, 151–56.
21. See Franklin and Roberts 2006, 132–62; Wendell 1996, 82–83.
22. A recent survey of research on the experience of disability in families con-
cluded, “There is an increasingly dominant body of research that finds aggregate
patterns of overall adjustment and well-­being to be similar across groups of fami-
lies with and without children with disabilities” (Ferguson, Gartner, and Lipsky
2007, 85).
23. When the leading American eugenicist, Harry Laughlin, received an honor-
ary degree from the University of Heidelberg, in 1936, he wrote to German officials
that the award represented “evidence of a common understanding of German and
American scientists of the nature of eugenics” (quoted in Kevles 1985, 118).

186 Dorothy E. Roberts
 PART IV

TOWARD A FEMINIST PRAXIS IN

SURVEILLANCE STUDIES
 10
ANTIPROSTITUTION FEMINISM
AND THE SURVEILLANCE OF
SEX INDUSTRY CLIENTS
UMMNI KHAN

For far too long, the social control, surveillance, and criminalization of
sex work has focused on the figure of the “prostitute” as the deviant, the
femme fatale, or the immoral transgressor.1 The participation of sex-­
industry clients was often excused based on gendered narratives that cast
them as helpless to their libidos or to the seductive wiles of sex workers.
In the last few decades, however, increased attention has been paid to
clients as subjects of research and objects of criminalization (Lowman
and Atchison 2006). Though such research and criminalization are still
not as prevalent as the study and arrest of sex workers, clients in the
Global North are emerging as a category of social deviance to be surveyed,
analyzed, and disciplined.
On a state level, this surveillance and discipline manifests in criminal
justice and police initiatives that target suspected clients, including street
sweeps, publication of names, vehicle seizure, and rehabilitative “john
schools” that endeavor to deter men from buying sexual services. Client
targeting, however, is not only happening at the state level. One sector of
the feminist movement is also actively involved in the surveillance and
construction of clients as deviants: antiprostitution advocates who couch
all sex work within the terms of “violence against women.” I (and many
other sex-­worker-­rights advocates) refer to this sector as prohibitionist
feminism because of its reliance on criminal prohibition as a key strategy
to eradicate the sex industry (van der Meulen, Durisin, and Love 2013,
14). While prohibitionist feminism rests on a solid bed of essentialism,
its adherents have also generated social science “evidence” to empirically
substantiate their anti-­prostitution claims.
In this essay I focus on one prohibitionist group, Prostitution Re-
search and Education (pre), to analyze how its empirical reports partici-
pate in surveillant logics, reify clients as deviants, and legitimate inten-
sified state surveillance and criminalization. Founded in 1995, pre is a
U.S. nonprofit organization committed to establishing the harmfulness
of prostitution and advocating for state solutions, including alternatives
to prostitution for the workers and punitive responses for the clients. I
focus on pre’s U.S. document, Comparing Sex Buyers with Men Who Don’t
Buy Sex (Farley et al. 2011), but also refer to three other publications pro-
duced in collaboration with pre: Challenging Men’s Demand for Prostitu-
tion in Scotland (Macleod, Farley, Anderson, and Golding 2008); Men Who
Buy Sex: Who They Buy and What They Know (Farley, Bindel, and Golding
2009), which focuses on men in England; and A Thorn in the Heart: Cambo-
dian Men Who Buy Sex (Farley, Freed, Phal, and Golding 2012).2 Despite re-
gional differences, all four texts draw on interview data with male clients
and construct the men as distinctly misogynist, deviant, dangerous, and
sexually violent. pre closes each report with a call to strengthen crimi-
nalization, surveillance, and stigmatization of sex clients.
My analysis of pre’s reports first situates social-­science discourse—
specifically surveys, interviewing, statistics, and the narrativization
of data—within the ambit of surveillance. Second, I problematize the
methodology and interpretation, delineating how pre’s client reports are
deeply flawed and patently distortive, even on their own positivist terms.
This refutation of pre’s empiricism demonstrates the faulty foundation
of its prohibitionist ideology, which is important given that pre’s execu-
tive director, Melissa Farley, is a key spokesperson for antiprostitution,
and her testimony is frequently used to “prove” the harms of prostitution
in legal and policy arenas.3 Third, I examine how prohibitionist feminist
social-­science discourse can be understood as a surveillant practice in alli-
ance with state surveillance and as exhibiting a carceral mentality. In par-
ticular, I consider how pre’s recommendations bolster the policing of the
sex industry, endorse surveillant biometric strategies, disproportionately
impact racialized and working-­class men, and justify prison sentences as
a means to discipline clients.

190 Ummni Khan
 I posit that part of the project of feminist surveillance studies is to
take a critical look at how surveillance is being used in the name of femi-
nism. In particular, I invite the reader to consider how feminist prohi-
bitionist discourse participates in the “surveillance of sexuality,” which
constitutes the deviance it purports to merely record (Walby and Smith
2012, 54). While the feminist prohibitionists at pre may intend to name,
confront, and eradicate violence against women in the sex industry, their
method rests, in part, on constructing the desire to purchase sexual ser-
vices as fundamentally deviant. This deviantized desire is gendered mas-
culine for two reasons: the majority of people who purchase sexual ser-
vices are men, and the small female demographic is almost completely
ignored in the scholarly literature, particularly in the feminist prohibi-
tionist literature (Weitzer 2005b, 225). This gendered construction of
masculine deviance relies on a social-­science approach to surveillance and
on empirically unsound data which dehumanizes clients and supports the
punitive state. Elizabeth Bernstein has named this approach to equality
“carceral feminism,” involving “a sexual politics that is intricately inter-
twined with broader agendas of criminalization and incarceration” (2010,
51). As with many criminalization agendas, those with the least social
capital disproportionately suffer from this form of sexual politics. None-
theless, all male clients, including privileged men, are vulnerable to sur-
veillance, shaming, and criminalization (see, for example, Zennie 2013).
I suggest that feminist attention to gendered oppression and issues of
surveillance should include consideration of the surveillance and crimi-
nalization of nonnormative male desires.

The Study of Prohibitionist Feminist Surveillance

Kevin Haggerty defines surveillance as a dynamic that involves “monitor-

ing people or things typically as the basis for some form of social inter-
vention” (2009, ix). Surveillance studies usually focuses on state or cor-
porate actors, and considers aspects of architectural design, technological
systems, digital interface, impersonal observation, panoptic effects, and
consumer analysis or media communications. Much critical scholarship
is dedicated to exposing how new technologically advanced surveillance
strategies touted as objective are deeply ideological apparatuses that dis-
enfranchise those who are most marginalized. This is urgent work. At the
same time, the glitz of high-­tech surveillance should not prevent us from
also paying critical attention to surveys as a traditional form of (and ety-

Antiprostitution Feminism 191
mologically connected to) surveillance. Using surveys of people as a tech-
nique of social control has occurred since at least as far back as the nine-
teenth century (Converse 2009, 13). Survey research that involves human
subjects, by definition, reduces and objectifies complex subjectivities into
data. Whether quantitative or qualitative analysis, research exposes its
subjects to the violence of interpretation, which includes the questions
that are asked of them, the words that are reproduced or omitted, the nu-
merical translation of the answers, and, of course, the rhetorical framing
of the final report. In this way, as Haggerty states, “Surveys and statisti-
cal analyses that measure, quantify and numerically characterize popu-
lations are epistemological modes linked to the rise of a surveillance so-
ciety” (2002, 12).
I build on Haggerty’s interlinking of surveys and surveillance. Of
course, there are differences to note between low-­tech surveys and high-­
tech surveillance. The surveys and statistics I examine represent discrete
periods of data collection undertaken by an ngo, as opposed to system-
atic surveillance procedures implemented by governmental or corporate
actors. To generate truth claims, survey-­generated surveillance does not
require state-­of-­the-­art instruments; the observation and recording of
data during interviews happens on an interpersonal level without the
need for technological devices. Nonetheless, old and new surveillance
strategies can share many problematic features. Both frequently rest on
a positivist ideology that constructs numerical representation as “hard
facts” and perpetuates the notion that scientific empiricism will deliver
reliable truths. Both often begin with particular assumptions about risk,
opportunity, and behavior. Both elicit only some kinds of information
based on the theoretical premise and political commitments of the sur-
veyors. Both can work as a form of social sorting that “obtains personal
and group data in order to classify people . . . according to varying crite-
ria, to determine who should be targeted for special treatment, suspi-
cion, eligibility, inclusion, access, and so on” (Lyon 2003, 20). Given these
overlapping characteristics and functions, new techniques of surveillance
can be understood as an extension, elaboration, and sophistication of the
traditional survey.
From this broader perspective, pre’s surveys thus participate in the
project of surveillance, generating data that constructs clients as posing
specific risks to women and thereby justifying special (criminal) treat-
ment. To advance their prohibitionist truth claims, the client reports

192 Ummni Khan
draw on quantitative and qualitative methodologies, using question-
naires, as well as structured and semi-­structured interviews. I outline
some of the most blatant examples of bias and distortion from both a
qualitative and quantitative perspective. In doing so, I understand that
social-­scientific representation of “truth” can never be ideologically neu-
tral. However, given that pre is working within the epistemic framework
of positivist truth, and that these reports are used to affect legal and
policy outcomes, it is important to look beneath their surface, to expose
and consider deeply problematic elements that undermine their persua-
sive value.
The scope of this essay does not allow for a comprehensive critique of
every qualitative or statistical claim. Rather, I seek to highlight some of
the most obvious weaknesses in pre’s methodology, approach, interpre-
tation, and conclusions, to set the stage for my final critique of the inva-
sive and punitive criminal sanctions pre recommends for clients. My cri-
tique is guided by Ronald Weitzer’s incisive articles “Flawed Theory and
Method in Studies of Prostitution” (2005a) and “Rehashing Tired Claims
about Prostitution” (2005c). Joel Best’s helpful books Stat-­Spotting (2008)
and Damned Lies and Statistics (2012) provide further tools to recognize
distortive empirical practices. I also turn to feminist-­methodology texts
to understand the extent to which pre has failed to learn from the critical
insights feminists have brought to the production of knowledge through
quantitative and qualitative interviews and questionnaires. Most helpful
in this regard are Sharlene Nagy Hesse-­Biber’s extensive anthology Hand-
book of Feminist Research (2012) and Caroline Ramazanoglu and Janet
Holland’s Feminist Methodology (2002).

Methodological Flaws and Distortions in the PRE Reports

All four reports were generated by pre in conjunction with local non-
governmental organizations (ngos) and volunteers who share a nega-
tive view of prostitution. As stated, pre is a nonprofit organization dedi-
cated to disseminating antiprostitution truth claims in public debates. As
Weitzer (2005a) argues, its founder, Farley, produces writings and presen-
tations that perpetuate a totalizing view of prostitution as exploitative,
as violent, and as an expression of male domination. This is exemplified
on pre’s webpage entitled “Prostitution and Trafficking—Quick Facts,”
where prostitution is defined by the following (Farley and Butler 2012):

Antiprostitution Feminism 193
 a ) sexual harassment
b) rape
c ) battering
d ) verbal abuse
e) domestic violence
f) a racist practice
g ) a violation of human rights
h ) childhood sexual abuse
i) a consequence of male domination of women
j) a means of maintaining male domination of women
k ) all of the above
pre conflates a multitude of issues, origins, and causes in its grab-­bag
attempt to establish prostitution as inherently heinous. The webpage
also cites dozens of other antiprostitution advocates, including some big
names in radical feminism, such as Andrea Dworkin (“Male dominance
means that the society creates a pool of prostitutes by any means nec-
essary so that men have what men need to stay on top, to feel big, liter-
ally, metaphorically, in every way” [1997, 2]) and Sheila Jeffries (“The sex
industry markets precisely the violence, the practices of subordination
that feminists seek to eliminate from the streets, workplaces, and bed-
rooms” [1997, 267–68]). In the acknowledgments section of Comparing
Sex Buyers with Men Who Don’t Buy Sex (hereafter Comparing Sex Buyers),
the reader gets more information about the political commitments of
those involved in the research. The report is funded by the Demand Aboli-
tion Project, which “focuses on eliminating men’s assumption of the right
to prostitution which would thereby eliminate the institution of prosti-
tution” (Farley et al. 2011, 5). Based on this political goal, it is clear that
the funders have a literal investment in the production of social-­science
knowledge that would justify their antiprostitution stance.
Best refers to such projects as “advocacy research” because they are
implemented by activist groups who already have a committed opinion of
the topic under study and whose primary purpose is to produce data to
convince others to adopt their opinion (2001, 47). Accordingly, there is a
strong indication that pre’s research will be vested in producing evidence
that supports the construction of prostitution as a violent institution. Of
course, from a feminist and critical-­theory perspective, there is no such
thing as a completely objective approach. As Ramazanoglu and Holland
say, “The notion that political commitment is an inextricable part of the

194 Ummni Khan
process of social investigation, and is compatible with knowledge of social
realities, even if this knowledge is partial, is central to feminist method-
ology: ‘detachment is not a condition of science’” (2002, 54, citing D. E.
Smith 1988, 177). Knowledge is thus always shaped by the researcher’s
experiences, belief systems, background, community, and identity, and is
interpreted within a sociohistorical context. The fact that pre has taken
a stand on the issue of prostitution and is an advocate for its abolition,
in part through the criminalization of clients and third parties, does not
mean the knowledge it produces is without value, but it does mean that
an evaluation of its reports should look for the ways in which this per-
spective may color the methodological choices and knowledge claims.
When evaluating the reliability of a survey-­based research project, one
of the first issues to consider is the sampling group. For each of its re-
ports, pre interviewed 101–133 men the ngo identified as “sex buyers.”
For Comparing Sex Buyers, pre also interviewed 100 men who claimed
they did not buy sex, in order to generate data on the differences between
the two groups of men. From these small samples, pre generalized about
the characteristics, behaviors, and attitudes of all male sex buyers, and
from the additional interviews of non-­sex buyers, they sought to differ-
entiate clients from the general male population.
For three of the surveys—Challenging Men’s Demand for Prostitution
in Scotland, Comparing Sex Buyers, and Men Who Buy Sex—the majority
of the men were recruited using newspaper advertisements. For A Thorn
in the Heart, the men were recruited via a snowballing technique that
began with interviewers asking their neighbors and acquaintances to par-
ticipate in the study. These methods are called “convenience samples” by
social scientists doing fieldwork and are nongeneralizable because the
group is not a random selection of sex buyers (or non-­sex buyers) (Weitzer
2005a, 938). Such samples can be skewed for a number of reasons. For ex-
ample, regarding the newspaper-­recruited male subjects, the advertise-
ment reached only readers of that particular periodical. Furthermore, the
kinds of people who would answer an advertisement and wish to discuss
their sexual practices and attitudes may not be representative of all sex
buyers or non-­sex buyers. With regard to the snowballing technique, the
resulting sample group was by definition narrow, since interviewers had
begun with people with whom they were already acquainted. Since pre is
an advocacy group that aligns prostitution with violence, how this belief
might have influenced who was selected for the study must be taken into

Antiprostitution Feminism 195
account. It should be noted, too, that it is impossible to conduct a ran-
dom sample of sex buyers. Given the taboo, criminalized, and secretive
nature of the trade, access to the sex-­buying population is always chal-
lenging. pre’s reports, however, do not qualify or nuance their knowl-
edge claims based on the limitations of the samples; rather, they gener-
alize and recommend serious criminal sanctions based on a nonrandom
sample of men. Out of the four reports, the only one to recognize the
limitations of the research was Comparing Sex Buyers. Toward the end of
that report, the authors acknowledge that men who respond to such ad-
vertisements “may differ in unknown ways from the general population
of men, including sex buyers” (Farley et al. 2011, 41). Nonetheless, this
section concludes that sex buyers are likely much worse (in terms of un-
desirable criminal behavior) than the report indicates, because subjects
in self-­report studies tend to respond in ways that they perceive to be
socially desirable: “We assume with some confidence that the numbers
reported in this study are conservative and are likely underestimates of
many of the attitudes and behaviors we were assessing” (Farley et al. 2011,
41). This assumption plays on what criminologists refer to as the “dark
figure,” the proportion of crime that goes unreported (Best 2012, 33). As
Best argues, “Activists usually believe that the problem they seek to bring
to public attention is both large and largely unrecognized, [so] there is a
substantial dark figure of hidden cases” (ibid., 50). pre ends its section on
the limitations of the research not only by using the power of the unveri-
fiable “dark figure” to suggest that the numbers are reliable as an indica-
tor of male sex buyers’ unsavory and criminal characteristics, but also by
implying that such men are probably even worse in this regard than the
study can verify. There is no mention of the crucial fact that data from the
small nonrandom sample are not generalizable.
Another area of interest in considering the reliability of the pre
studies are the questions used to gather data. As Best argues of advo-
cacy research, “Advocates word questions so as to encourage people to
respond in the desired way” (2012, 47). The pre reports are based on self-­
administered questionnaires and interviews. While the reports describe
the topics covered by the questions, none of the actual questions are in-
cluded, despite the fact that the reports are posted on the pre website
and thus presumably not subject to space constraints. This lack of trans-
parency is problematic. Weitzer has noted this methodological flaw in
studies authored by Farley and ones by Jody Raphael and Deborah L.
Shapiro, researchers who frame prostitution as violence (Weitzer 2005a,

196 Ummni Khan
939). In response to this criticism, Raphael and Shapiro contend that
Weitzer should have asked to view the survey before making assumptions
about its potential bias (2005, 967). As I agree that it is incumbent on the
researcher to provide the wording of key questions without compelling
the reader to chase after them (Weitzer 2005c, 972), I decided to be pro-
active. I emailed pre on 2 October 2012 to request a copy of the questions
used to generate the reports. Farley responded within a few hours, stating
she would “consider” my request, and asked about my view on the issues.
She also inquired whether I had published in the subject area. I responded
that I was interested in evaluating whether the questions in the pre re-
ports may have shaped the kind of data produced, and I attached three
articles I wrote that touched on the issue of sex work (email correspon-
dence, 4 October 2012). Farley ultimately did not share the questions. In
an email dated 24 October 2012, she explained that pre has shared the
questionnaires with psychologists, but suggested that nonpsychologists
have had difficulties with the interpretation, analysis, and comparison
with norms. Farley thus sidestepped the issue of research transparency
by drawing on disciplinary distinctions. Furthermore, there are no indi-
cations that the questions used involved complex psychological theories
or concepts. In any event, Farley does not elaborate on her justification
for concealing the questions.
Whatever Farley’s intentions, by withholding the questions from the
reports, pre prevents the reader from analyzing how ideological beliefs
may have influenced the wording or encouraged particular kinds of an-
swers. It also prevents replication of the study, which would allow other
researchers to test or extend the results. This methodological subterfuge
is troubling enough, but the fact that Farley inquired about my own per-
spectives on the issue while considering my request further adds to con-
cerns about pre’s research methods. Since her reason for not sharing the
questions—my status as a nonpsychologist—came only after I shared my
views on sex work, it seems likely that the real reason she denied my re-
quest was because of the perspective expressed in my publications, which
calls into question the academic integrity of the reports. From a feminist
perspective, this refusal signals a troubling reluctance to recognize and
dialogue across difference (Reay 2012, 627). Ultimately, without the actual
questions being available for analysis, the knowledge generated in the re-
ports is highly suspect.
Another misleading practice used in the reports was the selective but
decontextualized inclusion of quotes. For example, pre peppers the re-

Antiprostitution Feminism 197
port Comparing Sex Buyers with little snippets from their interviews of
“Sex Buyers” and “Non-­Sex Buyers.” While there is some diversity in each
group, the sex buyers’ quotes are often more crude in tone than are those
of the non-­sex buyers, and the non-­sex buyers often sound like committed
radical feminist men. Take, for example, two quotes from sex buyers: “Just
stick your dick in”; “Being with a prostitute is like having a cup of coffee—
when you’re done, you throw it out” (Farley et al. 2011, 3). Then take two
quotes from non-­sex buyers: “I am a sexual being, but it’s not a turn-­on
for me, knowing that the other person needs to be coerced”; “I would say
you are better off masturbating. Prostitution is a degrading thing for both
parties” (ibid.). The quotes are taken out of context, so the reader cannot
assess how statements that may have come before or after might frame
the quotes in a particular way. While this weakness in methodology is not
unique to pre, the decontextualization is heightened since none of the
quotes are assigned to a particular subject—pseudonyms are not used.
In table 1 for example, eleven quotes are attributed to “Sex Buyers” and
eight quotes to “Non-­Sex Buyers,” but none of the quotes in each category
are further differentiated. Because of this, potentially, all eleven of the
sex buyer quotes indicating a crude attitude toward sex workers could be
from a single interviewee, and all eight of the non-­sex buyer quotes in-
dicating an understanding of prostitution as exploitation could likewise
be from a single source. Yet, the way the quotes are presented leads the
reader to believe each quote is from a different person—which it might
be, but the reader has no way to confirm this one way or another. Com-
pare this choice with the way Teela Sanders cites the interviewees in her
study of fifty clients, Paying for Pleasure (2008). After each quote, Sanders
provides a pseudonym, and in an appendix she lists all the men by their
pseudonyms along with biographical data such as the subject’s age, occu-
pation, and marital status. Not only does this practice allow the reader
to differentiate quotes from different men, but the pseudonyms and bio-
graphical information humanizes the men, allowing the reader to imag-
ine the subjects as individual people without compromising their privacy.
pre’s practice of unidentified quotes has the opposite effect: the decon-
textualized quotes make the subjects appear one-­dimensional and homo-
genous. This reductionist approach allows pre to more easily stereotype
sex buyers as a deviant category of men deserving condemnation and,
more important, criminal sanctions.
Due to the problems outlined above—the committed antiprostitution
stance which drives pre’s research; generalizations based on convenience

198 Ummni Khan
samples; inattention to the limitations of such research; exploitation of
the “dark figure” to suggest sex buyers are worse than they will admit;
withholding the survey and interview questions used to create the re-
ports; Farley’s seeming unwillingness to share the questions with schol-
ars who oppose her essentialist antiprostitution perspective; and the lack
of differentiation between excerpted quotes—serious doubts emerge
about the reliability of the qualitative and quantitative data.
Comparing Sex Buyers also distorts statistical data to create a pejorative
picture of sex buyers. Advocacy research often takes recourse to this kind
of data, as it holds much traction in sociopolitical debates. As Haggerty
argues, “Rhetorical uses of statistics can do more than provide support,
they can also perform a type of social magic by giving political claims a
degree of urgency and aura of scientific truth that they might otherwise
lack” (2002, 8). I expose the methodological and semantic tricks behind
pre’s “social magic.” To do so is important because pre justifies its rec-
ommendations for expanding and strengthening the criminalization of
clients, in part, through the persuasive power of statistical data. While
combing through each statistic is beyond the scope of this chapter, I point
out a few blatant manipulations of numerical data that demonstrate the
weakness, if not the downright deceptiveness, of pre’s statistical claims.
At the beginning of the document, pre provides a “Summary of Find-
ings and Recommendations,” where it professes that “sex buyers engaged
in significantly more criminal activity than non-­sex buyers” (Farley et al.
2011, 4). This statement is not qualified, and the tabulation of criminal
activities is based on self-­reporting, so there is no way to know if any
of the men have accurately reported their activities. As pre itself notes,
interviewees may consciously or unconsciously hide facts to present in
socially desirable ways. pre discusses this concern in relation only to “sex
buyers.” Yet one might reasonably consider that the men who were willing
to admit to “buying sex” might have been more forthcoming about their
illicit activities than were the other men interviewed. In comparison, the
men who claimed they did not purchase sexual services may have been
particularly vested in coming across as upstanding citizens and might not
have been willing to share information regarding any criminal activity in
which they may have been involved. Furthermore, a close examination of
the information contained in table 16, “Crimes Committed by Sex Buyers
and Non-­Sex Buyers,” shows the extent to which the differentiation be-
tween the two groups is contrived. For instance, pre inflates the associa-
tion of criminality with sex buyers by including bizarre—even comical—

Antiprostitution Feminism 199
“crimes.” Under “property crimes,” for example, pre lists “selling balloons
without a permit” as an offence committed by one sex buyer. The inclu-
sion of such a minor infraction in pre’s evidence of the deviant nature of
clients suggests an attempt to stretch the numbers.
This number stretching also occurs in pre’s categorization of crimes,
which illustrates its efforts to create an indelible link between sex clients
and violence against women. In the section “Summary of Findings and
Recommendations,” pre states, “All of the crimes known to be associated
with violence against women were reported by sex buyers; none were re-
ported by non-­sex buyers” (Farley et al. 2011, 4). Taken at face value, this
statement suggests a stark and significant difference between the two
groups of men. But, if the reader looks at the fine print in table 16, which
lists the crimes, the difference between the two groups appears disin-
genuous and forced. The types of offences pre categorizes as “Violence
Against Women or Typically Associated w/vawa” are “impersonating a
police officer; violating a restraining order; indecent exposure—public
urinating; intimidating witnesses; lewd and lascivious behavior; destruc-
tion of property” (Farley et al. 2011, 35). None of these offences neces-
sarily signal violence against women, and no explanation is offered as to
why such offences are “typically associated with” violence against women.
While there may be an association between these offences and violence
against women—for example, violating a restraining order might be re-
lated to stalking—without more details with regard to the specifics of
each crime, the connection remains open to interpretation. In any given
instance, public urination could be more directly related to the criminal-
ization of poverty, as homeless people risk arrest when they engage in
basic survival activities (D. M. Smith 1994, 492). Conversely, from such a
broad perspective, other offences that pre lists under separate categories
might also have been classified as being “associated with violence against
women.” For example, “carrying a concealed weapon” was included in
the “weapons” category, and “assault but charges were dropped” was in-
cluded in the “assault” category, yet both could easily have been included
in the “Violence Against Women” category, at least according to the vague
terms of the report. Significantly, however, these offences happened to
have been committed by non-­sex buyers. Categorization here carries out
important ideological work: if these offenses were included in the cate-
gory of offences “associated with violence against women,” pre would not
have been able to make the claim that non-­sex buyers had not engaged in
criminal activities associated with violence against women.

200 Ummni Khan
 pre’s categorization of offences under separate headings in table 16 is
problematic in other ways as well. For example, not only does pre define,
without explanation, the crime “destruction of property” as typically
associated with violence against women, but it chooses not to include
that particular offence in the category “Property Crimes,” which would
arguably be its proper classification. Similarly, urinating in public might
better be categorized under the subheading “Crimes Against Authority—­
Disorderly Conduct,” which appears on the next page and includes ac-
tivities like “disturbing the peace” and “drinking in public.” pre offers
no explanation for how it organized categories, but it is hard not to sus-
pect ideological motives to skew the report in particular ways. By placing
select activities that might potentially relate to violence against women
under a heading that defines the activities as unequivocally related to vio-
lence against women, pre constructs and then inflates the statistical con-
nection between “sex buyers” and violence against women (despite the
fact that the activities are nowhere in the document proven to specifically
indicate violence against women).
pre’s rhetorical strategy is clearly to present its data in a dramatic
fashion via the category “Violence Against Women or Typically Asso-
ciated with vawa.” The careful reader, when looking at the fine print
under this heading, will note that with regard to the 100 sex buyers inter-
viewed, only six associated “criminal” incidents are noted—and they cor-
respond exactly to the six offence types pre chose to list under this cate-
gory. In addition, because pre does not differentiate between sex buyers,
it is possible that a single person committed all six of the crimes that
pre listed as associated with violence against women. But even if, for the
sake of argument, we assume each criminal incident was committed by a
different sex buyer, this suggests that, at most, a mere 6% of sex buyers
self-­reported activities that pre associates with violence against women.
Yet, pre’s summary converts this statistic into a dramatic narrative: “All
of the crimes known to be associated with violence against women were
reported by sex buyers; none were reported by non-­sex buyers” (Farley
et al. 2011, 4). pre chooses not to present their own data in percentages
or numerical terms, instead using the terms all and none to present a
certain story about the implications of the statistic. Best refers to such
narrative translation as the packaging of a statistic in the most impres-
sive format: “Quantities can be expressed in different ways, and we ought
to be alert for packaging choices that inflate the importance of figures”
(2008, 65–66). It is obviously more impressive to state that “all of the ac-

Antiprostitution Feminism 201
tivities known to be associated with violence against women were com-
mitted by sex buyers” than to state, somewhat anticlimactically, that six
out of 100 sex buyers engaged in acts that pre associates (for unknown
reasons) with violence against women. pre thus manipulates not only
the qualitative but also the quantitative data to bolster an essentialist
view of prostitution as violence and sex buyers as deviant, and to deliver
the empirical goods to its funder, the Demand Abolition Project.

Deterrents and Policy Considerations:

Surveys as Carceral Projects

Unfortunately, not only does pre frame the data ideologically to reinforce
its antiprostitution stance, the organization’s primary goal is to advance
a carceral agenda through state apparatuses. The carceral, as defined by
Michel Foucault (1995) and taken up by Bernstein (2010) in her theoriza-
tion of carceral feminism, denotes not just the use of incarceration as the
privileged means of social control, but also the proliferation of carceral
mechanisms that survey and discipline outside of prison walls. Under
the sections “Deterrents to Prostitution” and “Policy Considerations” in
Comparing Sex Buyers, pre advocates a multilayered carceral strategy to
punish, survey, stigmatize, and deter clients. pre encourages neoliberal,
right-­wing approaches to crime control which construct deviant popula-
tions and use public resources to expand the prison industrial complex
and the powers of criminal justice.
Several of pre’s suggested strategies specifically advocate for panoptic
and synoptic surveillance. In addition to jail time and increased fines,
suggested punishments include placement on sex-­offender registry lists,
public shaming in newspapers or billboards, and dna collection. Con-
structing clients as sex offenders who must be put on registries not only
further reifies and expands this demonized category, but also individual-
izes and decontextualizes sexual violence while deflecting attention from
the systemic causes of violence against women. Furthermore, as Erica
Meiners argues, “The expansion of sor [sex offender registries] contrib-
utes to the criminalization of public space and participates in producing
public feelings (disgust, fear) that work to legitimate surveillance and
incarceration technologies at the core of the pic [prison industrial com-
plex]” (2009, 51). Officially denouncing clients by publishing their names
in newspapers and billboards calls on the community to participate in
public-­shaming rituals, a strategy that relies on what Mathiesen (1997)

202 Ummni Khan
calls the “synoptic” community gaze, whereby the many watch the few
(1997, 218). Through this “synoptic” dynamic, sex clients become the
object of penal voyeurism, which is gratified by disgracing the stigma-
tized men.
While the advocacy and support of sex-­offender registries and public-­
shaming strategies evidences pre’s carceral feminism, Comparing Sex
Buyers concentrates primarily on persuading the reader of the need to
forcibly extract dna samples from arrested sex buyers. An entire sec-
tion of the report is dedicated to advancing these arguments: “Given the
criminal history of sex buyers documented in this research, one would
anticipate that other criminal activity including sexual violence might
occur in the future. Obtaining dna samples from arrested johns may be
useful to consider matches with evidence obtained in past and future
crimes. dna samples would be predicted to serve as a deterrent to buy-
ing sex since most people who commit crimes do not want their dna
taken” (Farley et al. 2011, 42). Again, pre performs a rhetorical sleight
of hand. Setting aside the report’s various methodological and statistical
problems, even pre’s own data does not support the generalization that
sex buyers are likely to have a “criminal history,” since only a minority of
the sex buyers they surveyed had been convicted of crimes, and none of
the crimes listed had any documented relation to sexual violence or vio-
lence against women. pre’s study provides no empirical reason to an-
ticipate that sex clients, whether they have a criminal record or not, will
engage in sexual violence. In addition, pre apparently has no interest
in due process, bodily autonomy, or the rights of the accused. Obtaining
dna samples of arrested—not convicted—clients for the purpose of de-
terring potential clients either presumes that all arrested men are guilty
or, even more troubling, that whether such men are in fact guilty is irrele-
vant. Furthermore, as Melissa G. Grant argues in her critique of dna col-
lection of arrested clients, “By threatening people with the possibility of
being marked for life in a government database, these well-­funded cam-
paigners—with allies in law enforcement, including the Department of
Justice—are using a questionably legal policing practice, a combination
of ‘scared-­straight’ strategies that became a signature of the war on drugs
and the extension of the surveillance state propelled by the war on ter-
ror” (2012, para. 1).
Table 20 in Comparing Sex Buyers evidences pre’s carceral feminist alli-
ance with the punitive state, which lists fourteen people who support
pre’s arguments for dna testing of arrested sex buyers. The supporters

Antiprostitution Feminism 203
include not just people working for ngos, but people associated with law
enforcement and prosecutorial offices, three of whom are also quoted
elaborating on the benefits of dna testing. The fbi special agent Roger
Young justifies collecting dna samples by making extreme claims about
the harms posed by johns: “If it were known that dna samples were ob-
tained from all arrested johns then it would assist in the prevention of
prostitution and the very harmful effects prostitution causes with every
aspect of society, morally, socially, economically—and our national secu-
rity” (Farley et al. 2011, 43). This statement signals a classic moral panic,
whereby those associated with an unpopular activity—in this case, buy-
ing sex—are objectified as a dangerous class of persons, as “folk devils,”
in Stanley Cohen’s words (2011, 2). Agent Young’s characterization of the
pervasive threat that sex clients pose to society recalls the construction
of gays and lesbians in the 1950s, which also deemed “deviant” sexuality
a threat to national security (Kinsman and Gentile 2010). In both cases,
sexuality outside of a heteronormative relational context is categorically
demonized and the “moral entrepreneurs” who attempt to regulate sexual
activity are not required to provide any evidence of wrongdoing.
The supporting quote provided by Alice Vachss, a prosecuting attor-
ney, further reveals the deeply conservative commitment to social justice
through penal policy that is embraced by pre and its allies. After con-
curring with pre’s advocacy for dna databases for clients, Vachss states,
“But one warning: the testing backlog is already so severe that any legis-
lative addition to the dna sampling list must provide for funding the
testing process or else it compromises the existing system” (Farley et al.
2011, 43). This reveals how the push to criminalize and survey clients is
inextricably linked to increasing financial support for neoliberal carceral
strategies of social control. Significantly, Comparing Sex Buyers never con-
siders how funneling money into invasive biotechnologies and the prison
industrial complex may divert public funds from social welfare, employ-
ment training, housing, and health care for those most at risk of engaging
in survival sex work. As Bernstein argues, such instances of antiprosti-
tution feminism are based on casting “carceral politics as gender justice”
(2010, 65).
Furthermore, the racism of this carceral politics is made evident when
pre attempts to inflate the number of people who would agree with their
dna collecting strategy while disregarding the concerns of those fighting
racialized oppression in the criminal-­justice system. The report states,

204 Ummni Khan
 Several people who are involved in work against violence against
women did not agree to be put on this list—not because they object
in principle to taking dna samples from arrested johns. They under-
stand that the criminal justice system is racist and is currently so
biased against men of color that they fear this practice would dispro-
portionately and unjustly harm men of color. Sadly, we understand
this reasoning. Since we have no evidence that men of color buy sex
any more or less frequently than white European-­American men, the
proportion of all men who are arrested for buying sex (and thus whose
dna we propose would be sampled) should be in proportion to their
numbers in the population at large, and should not exceed—or be less
than—the population percentage of those men. (Farley et al. 2011, 43)
pre pays lip service to concern that men of color will be disproportion-
ately harmed by such policies, but nonetheless persists in its call to action.
While pre is correct in stating that there is no evidence that men of color
buy sex more frequently than do white men, there is ample evidence that
men of color are disproportionately criminalized (M. Alexander 2012), in-
cluding disproportionately criminalized for buying sex (Brewer, Muth,
and Potterat 2008; Wortley, Fischer, and Webster 2002). Despite their
performance of understanding issues of disenfranchisement, pre does
not retract their advocacy of carceral biotechnologies.
pre’s disregard for the specificity of racialized state violence is drama-
tized in the concluding paragraph of Comparing Sex Buyers. In describ-
ing the goals of the prostitution “abolitionist” movement, pre analogizes
African American resistance to slavery and white supremacy to “prosti-
tuted women’s enduring resistance” to subjugation. In listing support
for this analogy, pre cites a blog entry from AfroSpear, which describes
itself as “A Think Tank for People of African Descent.” There is nothing
in the cited blog entry that addresses sex work, yet pre capitalizes on
the rhetorical power of antislavery struggles to advance its antiprosti-
tution stance. Not only does this appropriation decontextualize the blog
entry, it elides the specific violence of white supremacy and institutional
slavery. Further, pre exploits this analogy, despite the fact that the re-
port’s recommendations seek to strengthen the carceral state, which
effectively furthers a legacy of slavery that continues to disproportion-
ately dehumanize African American people, particularly in the United
States (Wacquant 2002).

Antiprostitution Feminism 205
Conclusion

I have explored how pre’s survey research operates as a form of surveil-

lance, how its data are distorted to reify clients as deviants, and how its
prohibitionist stance on sex work is in alliance with the carceral state. As
we engage in critical surveillance analysis, it is important to consider not
just how the government, corporations, employers, or individual stalkers
engage techniques of monitoring, categorizing, and spying in ways that
dehumanize and target vulnerable bodies, but also how social-­science re-
search techniques can be complicit in these reifying processes. In the case
of pre’s client reports, this reifying process legitimates and intensifies
the dehumanization and oppression of those most targeted for criminal-
ization and police surveillance. In particular, the construction of clients
as deviants bolsters and legitimates the criminal-­justice system, where
the usual suspects—racialized and working-­class men—are dispropor-
tionately rounded up and criminalized in the service of the prison indus-
trial complex. Moreover, this criminalization further strengthens the
hegemonic association of such men with sexual danger and perversity.
In addition, it is not just male clients who suffer when buying sex be-
comes criminalized. Female sex workers are victimized by prohibitionist
sociolegal discourses. When prostitution is defined as an antisocial and
criminal activity, sex workers continue to be stigmatized. As Lowman ar-
gues, “The prohibition and stigmatization of prostitution are the main
obstacles to creating safer working conditions for prostitutes” (2000,
1007). In Sweden, where the buying but not the selling of sex is crimi-
nalized, sex workers continue to be victimized (van der Meulen 2011).
Police sweeps of clients still displace sex workers, forcing them to seek
out clients in remote and isolated areas, where they are more vulnerable
to violence. This dislocation also makes it harder for sex workers to ac-
cess health and social services. Moreover, in a legal scheme where buy-
ing sexual services is criminalized, some clients will seek sexual services
in indoor settings. For street sex workers, fewer clients means increased
competition, and the resulting pressures to agree to less safe sexual prac-
tices, including not using condoms or servicing men who are intoxicated.
Singling out sex clients as a deviant class and celebrating those who
do not buy sex as good sexual citizens contributes to veiling the violence
that happens to women in private, sanctified settings. After decades of
feminist research that has sought to expose the ways marital sexual rela-
tions sometimes occur within a context of economic exploitation or vio-

206 Ummni Khan
lence, the vilification of clients can work against feminist challenges to
the idealization of marriage and monogamy. Indeed, the entire goal of
Comparing Sex Buyers is the production of difference between sex buyers
and non-­sex buyers, as is evidenced by the report’s subtitle: “ ‘You Can
Have a Good Time with the Servitude’ vs. ‘You’re Supporting a System
of Degradation.’ ” The juxtaposition of the two quotes—the first from a
sex buyer who appears to enjoy the sex worker’s supposed servitude, the
second from a non-­sex buyer who understands prostitution as a “system
of degradation”—idealizes men who condemn prostitution within prohi-
bitionist ideology. Yet, as feminists have pointed out for decades, often
the man who poses the most sexual threat to a woman is a husband, boy-
friend, or family member. By applauding men who prefer sexuality within
a long-­term relational context, pre obscures the violence that frequently
occurs between intimate partners.
Prohibitionist feminism is fundamentally antifeminist. It is up to inter-
sectional feminist scholars—who recognize the links between sexual nor-
mativity, neoliberalism, surveillance practices, and penal responses to so-
cial injustice—to expose the flawed methodology and problematic theory
behind reports like those authored by pre, and to challenge the carceral
strategies that they explicitly foster. In this way, we can demonstrate how
men, as well as women, can be subject to gender injustice, especially when
they exist at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalization.

Notes

1. See Jeffrey and MacDonald 2006; Pheterson 1990; Pheterson 1993.

2. See, respectively, Farley et al. 2011; Macleod, Farley, Anderson, and Gold-
ing 2008; Farley, Bindel, and Golding 2009; and Farley, Freed, Phal, and Golding
2012, all available at the Prostitution Research and Education website, http://
prostitutionresearch.com/.
3. For example, Farley was an expert witness for the Canadian government in
the R. v. Bedford case, to support the criminalization of prostitution. See “Affida-
vit of Dr. Melissa Farley,” http://myweb.dal.ca/mgoodyea/Documents/Canada
/Farley%20affidavit%20April%2008.pdf.

Antiprostitution Feminism 207
 11
RESEARCH METHODS,
INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY, AND
FEMINIST SURVEILLANCE STUDIES
K E V I N WA L B Y A N D S E A N T E L A N A Ï S

Scholarly examination of the relationship between feminism and surveil-

lance studies is important precisely because surveillance studies scholars
have not, for the most part, placed difference, gender, and sexuality at
the forefront of their enquiries. Feminist analyses are generally critical
of how power operates through classifications and categories. The joining
of feminist critiques with surveillance studies fosters a research agenda
focused on how assumptions about sex and gender are embedded in the
classifications and categories on which surveillance relies. Numerous
feminist scholars have shown how the categories that surveillance de-
pends on are gendered, sexualized, and racialized.1 As Shoshana Amielle
Magnet and Tara Rodgers (2012) note, feminist inquiries can also exam-
ine how gendered and sexualized surveillance intersects with racism,
ableism, and transphobia (see Ball 2005; Monahan 2009).
Yet it is important to reflect on what scholars mean by “feminism”
and “surveillance studies,” as a number of combinations of these ap-
proaches are possible. First, there are many schools of feminist thought.
As Kathy E. Ferguson long ago argued, “The feminist movement is di-
vided internally” (1984, 4). Second, there are many schools of thought
within the subfield of surveillance studies. Some of these are rooted in
the social sciences, while others stem from the humanities—for instance,
the intersection between critical media studies and feminist surveillance
studies (see Dubrofsky 2011a; Dubrofsky 2011b).
While surveillance studies generally and feminist surveillance studies
specifically are exciting new areas of research, some scholars have raised
questions about the conceptual and methodological clarity of the subfield
of surveillance studies.2 Gary Marx (2007) and Christian Fuchs (2013)
refer to surveillance studies as a subfield because it is a meeting place of
multiple disciplinary perspectives (e.g., sociology, political science, law,
communications studies). Multidisciplinarity is significant because it
opens up a larger conceptual and methodological tool kit for enriching
empirical research. It is tricky, too, because multidisciplinary sites some-
times result in a lack of conceptual and methodological focus, which is
what Marx (2007) has argued is happening to surveillance studies. This
becomes all the more apparent when surveillance studies in the social
sciences is compared to policing studies, security studies, and intelli-
gence studies, three other subfields with which surveillance studies over-
laps. These three other subfields are interdisciplinary and already offer
research agendas that examine surveillance. We interpret this to mean
that more can be done to devise innovative research methods for a social-­
science-­oriented surveillance studies. In response to the call by Fuchs
(2011) and Marx (2007) for conceptual and methodological clarity in sur-
veillance studies, we argue that social scientists must generate a set of
conceptual and methodological positions that do justice to the critical
merger of feminist theory with surveillance studies.
To address the need to foster a social-­science-­oriented method in sur-
veillance studies generally and feminist surveillance studies specifically,
we draw from feminist contributions focused on organizations, notably
the work of the Canadian feminist sociologist Dorothy E. Smith. Smith’s
research on how texts coordinate everyday experiences and translate
and transfer information from local sites to extralocal organizations has
much to offer surveillance studies. Smith develops a feminist method of
inquiry called “institutional ethnography,” which can be used to investi-
gate the key role of texts in surveillance practices. Institutional ethnog-
raphy provides one way of adding conceptual and methodological clarity
to surveillance studies generally and enhancing a social-­science-­oriented
feminist surveillance studies in particular.
We proceed in three parts. We begin by raising critical questions about
surveillance studies in relation to policing studies, security studies, and
intelligence studies to argue that clear and distinct conceptual and meth-

Research Methods 209
odological positions are needed in surveillance studies. In so doing, we
provide a rationale for drawing from the work of Smith on institutional
ethnography, which we argue can enhance social-­science-­oriented femi-
nist surveillance studies. Next, we discuss feminist contributions to
understandings of surveillance, categories and classifications, and bu-
reaucratic organizations. We then turn to Smith’s work to illustrate one
particular way of doing feminist surveillance studies that offers meth-
odological guidance for social scientists who study how power relations
become embedded in the classification and categorization practices that
surveillance entails.

What Does Surveillance Studies Do?

First we offer a reflection on what several scholars refer to as a research

methods gap in social-­science-­oriented surveillance studies. Marx (2007)
and Kevin Walby (2005b) argue that surveillance studies is in need of
a methodological program that will inform empirical research. There
should be a set of methodological positions and strategies that are unique
to surveillance studies if it is to be a distinct subfield. Similarly, Fuchs
(2011) posits that the core concepts of surveillance studies require refine-
ment. He contends that the limitation of surveillance studies in the social
sciences arises from an inconsistency of definitions. There is a conflation
of neutral (surveillance is any kind of watching) and negative (surveil-
lance involves coercion) definitions of surveillance, just as there is con-
flation of information gathering (looking around on social media) and
surveillance (which Fuchs suggests always involves state or capitalist or-
ganizations monitoring and attempting to control or manage different
populations). According to Fuchs, not all examples of watching or moni-
toring are examples of surveillance. Conceptual conflation has significant
consequences. For instance, if surveillance is defined as “any form of sys-
tematic information gathering, then surveillance studies is the same as
information society studies and the surveillance society as a term is syn-
onymous for the category of the information society” (Fuchs 2011, 126). If
the methodological and conceptual distinctiveness of surveillance studies
cannot be located, “there are no grounds for claiming that surveillance
studies is a distinct discipline or transdiscipline” (Fuchs 2010, 14). Marx
similarly claims, “A field needs greater agreement (or well-­articulated dis-
agreements) on what the central questions and basic concepts are, on
what it is that we know empirically and what needs to be known, and on

210 Kevin Walby and Seantel Anaïs

how the empirically documented or documentable can be ordered and
explained. . . . Reaching these objectives should be the next steps for the
field” (2007, 126). Writing about the research-­methods gap in surveillance
studies, Marx more bluntly states, “There is too much talk [a.k.a. meta-­
theory] and not enough research” (ibid.).
The trouble with methods Marx (2007) points to and the difficulty with
theory Fuchs (2011) outlines, give rise to the following question: what is
the distinctive methodological and conceptual position of surveillance
studies in the social sciences? David Lyon (2003) describes surveillance
as the collection of information and then the administration of a popu-
lation based on that collected information. Kevin D. Haggerty similarly
defines surveillance as “the collection and analysis of information about
populations in order to govern their activities” (2009b, 160). These defi-
nitions have their own limitations because “surveillance” is made up of
other processes often explored on their own outside of the overarching
analytical category of surveillance. For example, policy, practices, law,
texts, organizations, privacy, and power are all readily connected to sur-
veillance, but they just as often serve as distinct substantive concerns on
their own. Surveillance is like the weather: we talk about it every day, but
it is an amalgamation of processes and practices grouped together which
could be studied for their particularities. It is not clear how we might go
about studying such a multifaceted process as surveillance. It is difficult
to know what surveillance studies does because there has been little self-­
reflexivity about what surveillance scholars do. This reflexivity is impor-
tant in social sciences (Bourdieu 2004) if surveillance studies scholars
want to enhance the conceptual and methodological approaches that in-
form our work.
The methodological and conceptual distinctiveness of surveillance
studies becomes even more elusive when surveillance studies is com-
pared to three other long-­standing subfields: policing studies, security
studies, and intelligence studies. Policing studies has focused on domes-
tic, municipal, and provincial police agencies—not only on the police, but
also on private agencies involved in the maintenance of order. Collecting
information about social groups and acting on this information is the
fundamental task of policing agents. Much research has been published
in policing studies focusing on the collection and analysis of informa-
tion by policing agents, public and private, such that some scholars, in-
cluding Marx (1979), claim that the study of information gathering and
the analysis of information belongs to the domain of policing studies.3

Research Methods 211
Policing studies not only takes surveillance as its central object of analy-
sis, but also extends this claim by suggesting that surveillance is the key
axis through which social control is organized. In other words, policing
studies makes a claim about the importance of surveillance at both the
methodological and the conceptual level. What does surveillance studies
do beyond what policing studies has been doing for decades? Perhaps
policing studies focuses more narrowly on public and private policing
agencies in a domestic context, while surveillance studies focuses on a
wide array of agencies. While this may be the case—surveillance studies
does focus on a wider array of agencies that collect information about a
population group and then administer that group based on the informa-
tion collected—a look at security studies and intelligence studies raises
additional questions about the methodological and conceptual distinc-
tiveness of surveillance studies.
The second subfield we consider is security studies, which has long
focused on the collection of information and administration of popula-
tions in national and international contexts.4 The central focus of secu-
rity studies is on regulation that happens at different scales: the national,
federal, international, and global, concentrating on agencies that collect
information and administer populations across borders. Certainly this is
the form that security studies takes when it is conjoined with interna-
tional relations theory. Like policing studies, security studies examines
surveillance and further claims that surveillance is the organizing axis
of states, borders, and government actions. There is considerable over-
lap between surveillance studies and security studies, too, which again
reveals that more can be done to enhance distinct research methods in
surveillance studies.
Intelligence studies represents a narrower niche field of political sci-
ence.5 It focuses on the same array of agencies as security studies, which
includes national and federal as well as international and global agencies.
Yet the information on which intelligence studies scholars focus is dis-
tinct, in that intelligence is information that is not a matter of the public
record, and it is a kind of information subject to different collection and
analysis strategies than information gathered by police or security agen-
cies. Intelligence studies focuses explicitly on the consequences of sur-
veillance. In other words, intelligence studies already claims a focus on
surveillance as its defining feature.
In sum, these subfields claim surveillance as an object of analysis, and
did so prior to the development of surveillance studies, which in the so-

212 Kevin Walby and Seantel Anaïs

cial sciences can be traced back to Lyon’s book The Electronic Eye (1994).
This brief overview of surveillance studies suggests that there is work to
be done to create innovative conceptual and methodological positions
in surveillance studies: surveillance studies in the social sciences lacks
methodological distinctiveness when compared to policing studies, secu-
rity studies, and intelligence studies. Smith’s (1987) material focus on
texts in organizations as an approach to empirical research can help ad-
dress this issue, with particular utility for a feminist take on surveillance
studies in the social sciences.

What Kind of Feminism for Surveillance Studies?

Feminist theory comprises numerous political and analytical positions,

ranging from gender essentialism to radical constructivism, a kind of “big
tent” of feminism.6 The big tent has grown because feminist scholarship
has moved toward intersectional analysis to initiate a critique of essen-
tialist arguments.
The school of feminist thought we draw from highlights the significance
of how gender inequalities and power relations are reproduced in organi-
zations. The focus here is less on identity per se and instead on how orga-
nizations categorize, classify, and label people. This approach is Marxist
materialist—that is, it places emphasis on organizations and social rela-
tions. As an important example of this approach, Kathy Ferguson’s (1984)
book on the feminist case against bureaucracy critiques how knowledge
practices within organizations can be male-­streamed—­reflective only of
the experiences of men. Ferguson focuses on how knowledge practices
that operate through categories and classifications restrict life chances
for women and other people who are subjugated within these organiza-
tions. She analyzes organizational hierarchies and how administrators
within these organizations maintain these hierarchies through surveil-
lance of office staff. In Ferguson’s account, “supervision from above” and
“a complex system of written record-­keeping” (1984, 7) lead to a control-­
oriented work environment. Ferguson provides a fascinating assessment
of how women are subjugated within organizations through practices
of monitoring and oversight that are implicitly configured according to
gendered categories. As Ferguson notes, all the counting, checking, mea-
suring, and recording that occurs in organizations reifies conventional
understandings of gender roles.
Smith’s work (1987; 1999) on conceptual practices of power and textual

Research Methods 213
relations within organizations has likewise demonstrated how account-
ing and monitoring practices in organizations exclude the voices and
perspectives of women as well as other marginalized communities. Like
Ferguson, Smith focuses on how organizations are implicitly configured
according to gendered categories. Importantly, Smith develops a meth-
odological program. While Smith’s work is not explicitly geared toward
understanding surveillance—she has never identified as a surveillance-­
studies scholar—her writings (materialist in the Marxist sense of materi-
alism) focus on knowledge practices and organizations in ways that lend
themselves to studying and critiquing how surveillance practices, man-
agement, and accounting reproduce power relations within organiza-
tions and in other social spheres that those organizations regulate. What
Smith’s work allows researchers to do is empirically investigate how sur-
veillance processes are put together through work with texts in organiza-
tions. Smith’s work and specifically her method of inquiry—institutional
ethnography—can be extended to productively enrich feminist surveil-
lance studies.

Institutional Ethnography and Feminist Surveillance Studies

Researchers studying surveillance can benefit from engaging with Smith’s

(1987) feminist method of institutional ethnography (ie) because that
approach is unique in its ability to explicate how texts coordinate surveil-
lance practices in organizations. Smith’s focus on how managerial and
professional forms of governance (hereafter referred to as “ruling rela-
tions”) lift women specifically and people generally out of their embodied
and local ways of knowing, is an insight that has fostered many feminist
and critical interventions across the social sciences. The affinity between
Smith’s definition of ruling as “discursive, managerial, and professional”
(1999, 49) and the material world of surveillance processes made up of
texts, writing, inscribing, reading, and interpreting can be a key focus of
feminist surveillance studies.
ie is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the
local site of lived experience. Broadly, it examines how sequences of texts
coordinate consciousness, actions, and ruling. Smith’s approach emerged
out of feminist debates in the late 1960s. ie’s material focus on texts (e.g.,
applications forms, occurrence reports) is what allows it to investigate be-
yond the locally observable into the extralocal relations that regulate the
local through managerial practices and surveillance. This is because the

214 Kevin Walby and Seantel Anaïs

institutional ethnographer follows surveillance texts to see what kinds of
assumptions about sex and gender are embedded in these. For instance,
an institutional ethnographer would follow the path of an application
form, observe how it is worked with in an organization or in any agency
it is sent to, see what categories and classifications it deploys, and exam-
ine how surveillance translates the rich experiences of everyday life to a
series of words, numbers, and classifications. Part of learning ie is adopt-
ing Smith’s approach to social inquiry, since ie is not a tool one can use
without adopting a Marxist feminist materialist perspective. Theory and
method are intertwined in ie.
Alison I. Griffith’s (1995) research provides an example of how ie is
done. Her inquiry started when, as a single mother, she encountered dis-
courses in the education system that cast single parents as defective fami-
lies. Griffith began to explore how office administrators at the Board of
Education and teachers, social workers, and psychologists at schools used
the idea of “single-­parent families,” and how this was codified in texts and
assessments to measure the performance of children in schools (and, by
extension, their families at home). She found that single-­parent families
fell under more scrutiny by these organizations. This research was ex-
tended into an interview-­based exploration of how women with children
in elementary school negotiate the notion of normal families and the
various texts, evaluations, and assessments that apply this understand-
ing of family (Griffith and Smith 2005). Griffith and Smith show that
the standpoint and experiences of mothers disappear into these texts,
evaluations, and assessments, and that the work of mothers and teach-
ers becomes coordinated through this discourse about normal families
and the related texts and assessments. The focus on texts is important
because as James Rule (1973) has shown, texts extend the surveillance
capacity of organizations. Rule argues that the surveillance capacity of
organizations is shaped by the number of files, the degree of centraliza-
tion of files, the speed with which the texts flow between locales in the
network, and the number of contact points between the organization and
the subject population (1973, 37–40).
Since ie uses interviews and observations to follow around surveil-
lance texts and observe how these texts are used, ie can help address
the research-­methods gap in surveillance studies (recall Marx 2007). ie
should be of special importance to surveillance researchers because it
allows researchers to empirically investigate how surveillance processes
are put together in organizations through work practices involving texts.

Research Methods 215
Surveillance involves first and foremost the collection of information re-
garding a subject population. Information is collected, sorted, sent, and
received by people in organizations. However, Smith notes that “informa-
tion” is not something that we can study alone since “the term information
is itself deceptive. It hides the production and reading of texts that have a
specifically standardized form enabling them to be treated as equivalent
to one another and to be read using procedures that read through . . . the
words and/or numbers to an imputed actuality beyond them” (2006, 72).
An ie approach to feminist surveillance studies explores the production
and reading of texts that are part of surveillance, exposing how surveil-
lance reduces everyday life to numbers, categories, and classifications. It
is this final step in ie that can assist a feminist project, since the purpose
is to show how classifications become gendered and sexed.
Using ie as a method can help feminist-­surveillance-­studies schol-
ars break surveillance down into its constituent parts (texts, work, or-
ganizations) and make the process amenable to detailed ethnographic
study. As a method of feminist inquiry, ie focuses on the reading and
writing of texts in organizations and how this work with texts contrib-
utes to ruling practices. Texts refer to words, images, or sounds that are
set into a material form that are read, seen, heard, or watched. Texts are
actual material things, written and read in the same place and time as
the writer or reader engages with them, and then sent to other readers
or writers who work with the information. An example would be an oc-
currence report completed by a police officer after monitoring a suspect,
or a threat assessment completed by an intelligence officer after spying
on a social-­movement group. The occurrence report might be sent to an
attorney within police services or to police officers in another jurisdic-
tion, while the threat assessment might be shared with other security
intelligence agencies in the same country or in other countries. A text
in ie could also be a video such as cctv footage or a freeze-­frame pic-
ture from the same material that is interpreted by someone watching
the camera and translating what they see into a set of notes, which are
then used in an investigation or prosecution (see Walby 2005a). Texts are
sent and received between work sites. The flow of information that ie
explores always emerges in actual and multiple locations—termed “pro-
cessing interchanges” (Pence 2001)—where information is produced in
the form of a text, form, file, or dossier. When these texts facilitate the
monitoring of people in their everyday lives and the governance of those
lives based on the conveyance of the texts between organizations, we call

216 Kevin Walby and Seantel Anaïs

this the “material relations of surveillance.” These relations are grounded
in textual practices that can be analyzed using ie’s feminist methodologi-
cal lens. The material relations of surveillance are the sending and re-
ceiving of texts that allow for surveillance to happen. To be sure, ie is
set up for social scientists and sociological investigations of organiza-
tions (but is still appropriate for use in allied scholarly fields). ie requires
ethnographic research in organizations where surveillance practices are
happening. The institutional ethnographer can enter the sites in the sur-
veillance network where texts are created, translated, and interpreted, to
explore how surveillance processes connect down with the local and con-
nect up with organizations.
Participants in the material relations of surveillance are connected
through texts and the organizational features that shape work processes.
Texts transport the observations and discriminations of surveillance
practices from one setting to another, at the same time as the particu-
larities of our everyday lives disappear into these data flows. Surveillance
texts must be treated as active in coordinating work across organizations.
However, it is only at the local site that researchers can begin to inquire
into surveillance practices. For example, consider the police officer writ-
ing out the occurrence report or the intelligence officer writing out the
threat assessment. They compile these documents based on a reading of
other texts, such as their own notes, or other occurrence reports or threat
assessments from different officers, or video surveillance footage. It is
the site of reading and writing of the surveillance texts themselves that
the institutional ethnographer wants to find and observe. This is why de-
tailed empirical investigations using interviews and observations are key
in ie. Interviews and observations must be used to try and understand
the ways in which surveillance happens and to investigate all the work
people do to make surveillance happen in organizations. When the text is
sent from site to site, it coordinates action by multiple workers in many
organizations. This coordination function is what institutional ethnogra-
phers refer to as the active text. That the text is active also necessitates its
reading or activation by a person who is doing some kind of monitoring or
who is trying to make some sense of the information. Institutional eth-
nographers refer to this reading and interpretation as activation of infor-
mation within the text. Activation of a text involves the interpretive pro-
cesses of reading (D. E. Smith 1990, 121). Of course, texts are activated in
different ways at different times and places. Discrimination and interpre-
tation are constant features of surveillance, as numerous surveillance-­

Research Methods 217
studies scholars have indicated (see Haggerty 2009b; Monahan 2009).
The point is that without an ethnographic focus on people who do the
work of reading, interpreting, and inscribing texts, researchers are left
with only general and abstract claims about information instead of ex-
ploring the production and reading of texts on which actual surveillance
practices are based. The ethnographic component is crucial in light of the
research-­methods gap in surveillance studies (also see Marx 2007).
In ie the purpose is to explore how diverse individuals and groups
with real experiences are reduced to categories and numbers in the data
flows and organizational processes of surveillance. To get at these pro-
cesses, ie relies on interview transcripts, observations, and secondary
documents as data. Asking respondents how they work with texts or how
they are the subjects of surveillance can explicate the ways that surveil-
lance reaches down into people’s lives and connects up with extralocal
organizations. When interviewing, it is crucial to listen for mention of
and ask about texts (Devault and McCoy 2002, 765), as they are the key
element of the material relations of surveillance. The institutional eth-
nographer should conduct interviews outside of the initial work location,
and ideally interview those who are monitored, those doing the monitor-
ing, those working with the texts and conveying information, and any
other people involved in these material relations of surveillance. Interro-
gating these practices at processing interchanges where people work with
texts exposes both the subjective aspects of reading and writing involved
in text production as well as the other organizations that the text con-
nects into the surveillance network. After interviewing those working
in organizations who are part of the material relations of surveillance,
one should analyze their talk (in the form of an interview transcript) to
figure out how the work of doing surveillance and categorizing people in
texts is conducted. After interviewing those who are being monitored,
one should analyze their talk to locate how their lives and experiences
are governed through surveillance practices. A commitment to ie in the
context of feminist surveillance studies, then, is a commitment to quali-
tative research and ethnographic investigation of surveillance practices.
Once the institutional ethnographer has conducted interviews with
those who are being monitored, those doing the monitoring, and those
working with the texts, it is possible to construct a map of what texts are
involved, where these texts go in the surveillance network, and how they
connect back to the governance of everyday life. The maps depict the ma-

218 Kevin Walby and Seantel Anaïs

terial relations of surveillance between organizations as well as the work
that goes on within each unit in the organizations involved. For instance,
Walby (2005a) mapped out how video surveillance footage can lead to
a process that involves many more texts (e.g., occurrence reports, legal
documents) and agents (e.g., Crown prosecution, defense lawyers), and
where the experiences and realities of the person caught on tape get re-
duced to institutional jargon and categories. Institutional ethnographers
produce maps of these interconnections as a way of visualizing them, and
to show interviewees where in the organizational process their experi-
ences disappear from view. Interviewing is crucial for understanding how
people work with texts, while mapping is key for demonstrating the scope
of the surveillance network and the places where texts are worked.
A good example of an ie is Janet Rankin and Marie Campbell’s (2009)
research on how hospital reform has led to the creation of new texts and
work regimes that involve the surveillance of nurses and a reduction of
the lives of patients to a series of standard numbers and classifications.
Rankin and Campbell report on interviews with nurses who are moni-
tored, but also with administrators who create the categories and classifi-
cations used to influence monitoring practices and measure nurse perfor-
mance and efficiency. Rankin and Campbell also create maps of the work
that goes on within each unit in the connected organizations. The maps
show how ministries and other agencies outside the local setting of nurs-
ing organize the categories and push for standardization. As Rankin and
Campbell argue, it is only possible to explore the surveillance and cate-
gorization evident in these processes through qualitative explorations
based on interviews and observations in the local site. To do feminist
surveillance studies following ie, one needs to be committed to ethno-
graphic research, not only following surveillance texts to where they are
used, but also showing how classification and categorization are integral
to the regulation of people subject to surveillance. In this way, ie can con-
tribute to methodological refinement in surveillance studies.

Conclusion

There remains a need for conceptual and methodological enhancement

in the field of surveillance studies (Fuchs 2011; Marx 2007). Surveillance
studies must develop a unique set of conceptual and methodological
tools. Our purpose in raising these questions about surveillance studies

Research Methods 219
is to invite attention to the development of a rationale and justification
for surveillance studies, and to suggest ways of integrating a critical femi-
nist voice to these lively discussions.
Feminist scholarship’s critique of power relations and its vision of
politics is a useful position from which to understand the work and the
consequences of surveillance. Many feminists have provided remarkable
analyses along these lines, most notably Smith, with her material focus
on texts and ruling relations. Our purpose has been to provide a specific
methodological approach for feminist surveillance studies in the social
sciences. Drawing from the work of Smith provides one way of enhancing
methodological clarity in surveillance studies. ie invites critical attention
to the material practices involved in organizing surveillance. The work
people do with texts when conducting surveillance is a point of entry
for understanding how the material relations of surveillance are orga-
nized, and it is these relations that institutional ethnographers explore.
Smith’s sociological focus on how texts are made up of categorizations
and classifications and how these texts move information from the site of
local experience to extralocal organizations provides a Marxist material-
ist feminist perspective that can enrich feminist surveillance studies. The
promise of drawing from feminism and ie in doing surveillance studies is
to show how ruling relations are enabled by the texts and classifications
that make up surveillance.

Notes

1. See Ball 2005; Eubanks 2006; Magnet and Rodgers 2012; Monahan 2009.
2. See Fuchs 2011; Marx 2007; Walby 2005b.
3. For research in policing studies, see Corsianos 2009; Ericson 1981; Ericson and
Haggerty 1997; Manning 1977.
4. See Bigo 2002; Collier and Lakoff 2008; Daase 2008; Kessler and Hudson 2005.
5. See Gill 2004; Rempel 2004; Rudner 2007.
6. See Marcus 2005; O’Driscoll 1996; Rosenberg and Howard 2005.

220 Kevin Walby and Seantel Anaïs

 AFTERWORD

BLAMING, SHAMING, AND

THE FEMINIZATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA
LISA NAKAMURA

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice according
to race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. . . . Your legal concepts
of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They
are based on matter, there is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, un-
like you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.

—John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”

As the essays in this excellent volume show, surveillance does more than
simply watch or observe bodies. It remakes the body as a social actor, clas-
sifying some bodies as normative and legal, and some as illegal and out
of bounds. There is no form of surveillance that is innocent. Technolo-
gies such as body scanners, ultrasounds, networked genomics, and other
increasingly compulsory forms of biometric monitoring serve two func-
tions: to regulate, define, and control populations; and to create new gen-
dered, racialized, and abled or disabled bodies through digital means. As
Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Kelli D. Moore, Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Cur-
rah, and Andrea Smith’s works in this volume show, this has been true
since well before the Internet appeared, with lock hospitals and homeless
shelters functioning as surveillant state institutions that confined and
monitored poor women, women of color, and migrant women. This vol-
ume describes how both predigital and digital technologies have enabled
new and more comprehensive forms of “dataveillance” that dispropor-
tionately target women and minorities. This volume is a vital new contri-
bution to digital media and feminist studies.
The essays in this collection illustrate how badly mistaken both the
Internet’s critics and its digital utopians were in the 1990s, when both
cohorts asserted that the Internet would make surveillance impossible.
As John Perry Barlow wrote in “A Declaration of Independence of Cyber-
space” (1996), the Internet was a place where users left their bodies be-
hind, and the lack of physical bodies prevented not only identification,
but also the possibility of “physical coercion” of members by other Inter-
net users and also by the state. The ability to participate anonymously or,
as was and remains far more common, pseudonymously was an integral
part of why Barlow and other Net utopians saw the Internet as valuable.
Before 2004, when Facebook and other social-­media services began to
require “real names” authentication—via what danah boyd describes as
“terms of service [agreements that] explicitly require [their] users to pro-
vide their ‘real names and information’ ” (2012, 29)—many online social
spaces permitted users to construct their own bodies, bodies which sup-
posedly did not definitively establish their users as female or male, as
white or black or brown. Though, as boyd notes, not all Facebook users
complied with the real-­names requirements, and “late teen adopters [of
Facebook] were far less likely to use their given name” (ibid., 29–30), it
is now the norm for social-­network-­service (sns) users to provide real
names. This is a significant shift from the pre-­s ns period, when the re-
making or refashioning of one’s body on the Internet was celebrated by
digital utopians such as Barlow. Barlow, Mark Hansen, and others from
this period envisioned the Internet as a race- and gender-­neutral space
where virtual bodies replaced real ones. They envisioned users’ “electronic
bodies” as a directly oppositional practice to states or other sociopolitical
institutions that might define users in oppressive ways or seek to control
their behavior.1
Yet the remarkable case of Natalie Blanchard, a depressed woman who
lost her Canadian disability benefits because, according to the insurance
company who accessed her Facebook pages, her profile pictures showed
her in a bikini on vacation looking “too happy” to be depressed, reminds
us that the real-­names Internet has the potential to coerce us all (see Saw-
chuck 2010). For women on social-­networking sites, there is a constant
negotiation between the desire to connect and the need to self-­regulate.

222 Lisa Nakamura
Our identities are inextricably attached to the cultural contingencies of
our gendered bodies.
For instance, as Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood discuss in
this volume, female celebrities who post to Twitter are viewed as respon-
sible for the displays that place them under surveillance, implicating
them in their own objectification. At the same time, women on these
sites generate a significant amount of the user traffic and profit for social-­
networking companies, and in fact, endure significant pressure to behave
in ways that actively invite a sexualized gaze. Women perform much of
the “free labor” of social media: they are more likely to use Facebook than
men; they use picture-­sharing services like Instagram and Pinterest more
frequently (Duggan and Brenner 2013); they populate and generate origi-
nal and unique content for fan bulletin boards; and they produce and
share fan fiction. As Mark Andrejevic (2009) and others have shown, this
subjects them to new and invisible forms of surveillance and enclosure
as every click, every post, and every log-­on is measured and often sold to
advertisers.
In response to this troubling state of affairs, Geert Lovink and Ko-
rinna Patelis’s Unlike Us project has brought together “a research network
of artists, designers, scholars, activists, and programmers who work on
‘alternatives in social media’ ” with the goal of propagating the “further
development and proliferation of alternative, decentralized social media
software” (Lovink and Patelis n.d.). This network proposes to produce an
anti-­Facebook form of social networking and encourages, as a first step,
boycotting for-­profit centralized social-­media platforms. While it is hard
for many in our current social-­media age to envision a new system of free
and publicly owned social media, it is difficult to imagine how, without
this shift, users can be protected from having their personal data har-
vested and potentially sold.
While the development of alternative platforms for digital interaction
is a promising goal given the huge amounts of time, data, and personal
information we willingly give to for-­profit corporations to keep, sell, or
simply save, this approach has some problems. It is exactly those vulner-
able populations—children, poor women, migrants, older women—who
are the least able to “quit Facebook.” Users who lack digital literacies as
well as cultural ones are less likely to be aware of alternatives to services
like Facebook, or indeed, to be aware of the risks associated with their use
in the first place. As the essays in this volume show, women and people
of color are still overwhelmingly the objects of the biometric and sur-

Afterword 223
veillance gaze, as they have always been. Lack of access to digital tools
and techniques, the industry practice of shipping smartphones and other
mobile devices preloaded with applications like Facebook, YouTube, and
Twitter (Washington 2011), and, most important, a lack of awareness of
options and training in how to seek out and install alternative platforms
makes it unlikely that the most-­surveilled populations in Canada and
North America can escape from the “walled garden” of social media.2
In the introduction to this volume, Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Mag-
net ask a timely question: “How do questions of empowerment and re-
sponsibility become articulated when individuals operate the technolo-
gies that functionally surveil them and are used to obstruct their right to
the privileges of citizenship, including assistance from the state?” (00).
Social media have become a space of intense surveillance and punish-
ment of feminist activism and activity, most recently in the shared spaces
of digital gaming.3 Anita Sarkeesian, a Canadian American blogger and
media critic whose video blog Feminist Frequency focuses on the profound
sexism in commercial video games, discovered this the hard way when
she put up a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 inviting readers to finance a
video series on sexist tropes in games. Sarkeesian received personal mes-
sages that, as Mia Consalvo (2012) writes, established just how “toxic”
the culture of digital gaming is, as male gamers flooded the Internet with
death threats and user-­generated video games that invited users to punch
and bruise Sarkeesian’s face.
Early Internet utopians claimed the Internet would give everyone the
power to surveil, to see and not be seen, to become a bodiless and thus
unseeable user. Instead, we have become more visible and trackable than
ever. Social-­media companies are now, for all intents and purposes, com-
munication utilities that we depend on for access to friends and commu-
nity. Female users and other users from marginalized and stigmatized
groups are differentially targeted as objects of surveillance and victim-
ization in social media. For example, Blanchard (the woman accused of
looking too happy in her Facebook pictures, thus losing her disability in-
surance) and Sarkeesian lost their rights to safety, support, and state-­
recognized protection from harm by engaging in public activities that
threatened patriarchal norms. While Blanchard’s beach photos were the
result of one of the most common and everyday uses of social networks—
sharing pictures with friends—they exposed her to comparison with the
normative “depressed body,” a comparison in which she was found lack-
ing. Sarkeesian was surveilled by a community of journalists and gamers

224 Lisa Nakamura
who subjected her to forms of intensely gendered and racialized violence
and oppression. She received numerous death threats and was mocked
on many gaming forums for being “ugly,” and Jewish, though in fact Sar-
keesian is Armenian.
There is a key difference between these two cases. Sarkeesian was a
blogger who sought readers and visibility when she posted her work and
requests for project crowdfunding on the Internet. Blanchard was not.
Whether women use the Internet to produce feminist work overtly cri-
tiquing sexist digital industries like gaming, as Sarkeesian did, or merely
venture onto private networks such as Facebook to share pictures, they
are exposed to both symbolic and legal violence.4 Troublingly, the state
is unlikely to provide solutions; online harassment is robustly resistant
to policing partly because of anonymity and pseudonymity, and online
threats often are not taken seriously, but rather are tolerated as part of
Internet culture.
I am inspired by Dubrofsky and Magnet’s call for an alternative to tra-
ditional forms of regulation like the surveillant policing and criminaliza-
tion of offenders, a system that has been amply proven not to work well
in the case of video game sexism and racism (Nakamura 2011). As Dubrof-
sky and Magnet ask, “How might we think about how to build coalitions
across difference? A feminist approach to surveillance studies also argues
for a reimagining of collective responses to the violence of state scrutiny,
one that seeks to uproot and defy oppressive structural systems, envi-
sioning collective forms of resistance to violence that do not involve state
surveillance of those living either inside or outside its borders, and asks
how we might make our communities safer while continuing to refuse
surveillance practices” (this volume, 16).
One place to look for these possibilities is the world of feminist digital-­
gaming activism where there is a small but vital group of feminist, anti-­
ableist, and antiracist blogs, Tumblr sites, and Twitter hashtags (see
#1reasonwhy and #YesAllWomen) that exemplify the community-­driven
options that the Internet makes available to women. These blogs success-
fully appropriate the social-­media tools that we already have to exercise
forms of countersurveillance that are noncoercive in nature. The blogs
Fat, Ugly or Slutty, Not in the Kitchen Anymore, The Border House, The Hathor
Legacy, and Racialicious collect racist, sexist, and homophobic hate speech
that female and queer gamers have received while playing networked
video games and publicize them for all to see (Nakamura 2012).5 These
sites do not solely rely on the state or on corporations such as Microsoft

Afterword 225
and Sony to “police” offenders (though readers are encouraged to sub-
mit report tickets to these companies if they deem that an appropriate
response); instead, they produce feminist countersurveillant media that
present an alternative to either criminalizing offenders, boycotting, or
trying to shut down gaming networks, or breaking them for others.
When women create their own networks for posting content about
video-­game racism and sexism, they can have unexpectedly wide reach-
ing and powerful effects. In a post entitled “Perspectives and Retrospec-
tives: Vol 3,” the author “gtz,” a cofounder of Fat, Ugly or Slutty, tells a
fascinating tale of her and her collaborators’ work building a coalition of
antiracist, antisexist gamers. As she writes, “We’ve received letters from
parents expressing gratitude for the ‘work’ that we do and their thoughts
on how it affects their childrens’ lives. . . . We get ‘thought this might
interest you’ emails from people linking us to various gaming, gender, and
harassment-­related issues that have popped up online. All over forums
and blogs and Twitter people are expressing relief at not feeling alone in
harassment” (gtz 2012). This post appeared in the “Staff Blog” section of
the site on 1 February 2012, and it directly addresses Dubrofsky and Mag-
net’s call for a community-­driven option as a response to gamer violence.
For as gtz reports,
A couple of weeks ago, FUoS [Fat, Ugly or Slutty] had another first—a
request from someone to have their harassing messages taken off the
site. This person had googled their own username, and lo and behold,
all the results came up with fat ugly or slutty dot com. We’ve
had folks “featured” on the site show up in comments and defend their
actions, or deliberately try and incite some flamewars . . . but this was
new . . . this was the first time someone actually had expressed a modi-
cum of regret after seeing it on FUoS.
gtz goes on to describe how she decided to handle the request to take
down the poster’s abusive message. The poster described how when he
googled his username and saw his original post; he wrote to FUoS, “Can
you remove that its dumb and immature im only 16 when I made that to
sum chick cause I was bored and id like to not be reped in that way could
you please take it down? I learned my lesson don’t be a jackass on inter-
net things.” As gtz writes, “There’s something, something in the email that
says he gets it, even just a little bit, and I believe it.” In the end, the site
moderator decided keep the original post onsite, but remove all refer-
ences to his username, thus protecting his privacy and reputation.

226 Lisa Nakamura
 This decision to “police without policing,” exemplified by gtz’s actions
in this case, embodies a feminist ethics of pedagogy and care. It responds
to the harrasser’s assertion to have “learned his lesson” by hailing an af-
fective register; as gtz writes, “A lot of this is gut feeling and that’s partly
why I wanted to do this series.” She identifies her decision to anonymize
the young man’s post to protect him from publicity and ridicule as ema-
nating from her “gut,” but there is clearly far more at play. As she writes,
the site originated as a way to help women publicize gamic harassment,
but had unexpected consequences.
Parents as well as bloggers, Twitter users, and gamers came together
to form a feminist community based on media activism on Fat, Ugly or
Slutty. Though their actions were the result of frustration and disenchant-
ment with the game industry’s ability or desire to address the toxic envi-
ronment of many of its products, they advocated a two-­pronged approach
that included both “official” regulation and community-­based documen-
tation and activism. Fat, Ugly or Slutty models an alternative ethics of
regulation that stands in sharp contrast to Sony and Microsoft’s official
complaint-­handling policies in regard to their gaming platforms, a policy
based on irregular enforcement of a terms-­of-­service agreement that is
rarely read by players and is written in legal, rather than affective, dis-
course. As more of our lives continue to become mediated by social media
and gamic worlds, we would do well to look out for such models. This is
not a utopian story: there’s no way to verify that the young man was tell-
ing the truth or that his experience will deter him from hate speech the
next time he plays online games with women. It is, however, ultimately
a hopeful one.

Notes

1. For an eloquent argument, see González 2009.

2. According to Jesse Washington (2011), people of color are far more likely to
access the Internet from a mobile device, effectively creating “two Internets,” one
for privileged broadband users, and another for mobile users who must deal with
the limitations of small keyboards, impoverished interfaces, and less interactivity:
“Fifty-­one percent of Hispanics and 46 percent of blacks use their phones to access
the Internet, compared with 33 percent of whites, according to a July 2010 Pew
poll. Forty-­seven percent of Latinos and 41 percent of blacks use their phones for
email, compared with 30 percent of whites. The figures for using social media like
Facebook via phone were 36 percent for Latinos, 33 percent for blacks and 19 per-
cent for whites.”

Afterword 227
 3. For an excellent analysis of the pervasively antifeminist climate of computing
culture generally, see Marwick 2013.
4. For an excellent account of the intermingling of these labor and leisure issues
engendered by digital mobile media, see Gregg 2011.
5. See, respectively, http://www.fatuglyorslutty.com/, http://www.notinthe
kitchenanymore.com/, http://www.theborderhouse.com/, http://www.thehathor
legacy.com/, and http://www.racialicious.com/.

228 Lisa Nakamura
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 CONTRIBUTORS

Seantel Anaïs is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the Uni-

versity of Winnipeg. Her research program focuses on critical security studies and
critical sociolegal studies. Her two ongoing projects examine the materialities of
Cold War sites of security, one with regard to their recent transformations, and
the other about mass litigation in war material contamination cases. Her articles
have appeared in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, the Canadian Journal of
Sociology, Critical Discourse Studies, Cultural Politics, Security Dialogue, and Deviant
Behavior.

Mark Andrejevic is associate professor of media studies at Pomona College. He

examines popular culture and new media from the perspectives of critical theory
and cultural studies. He is interested in the ways in which forms of surveillance
and monitoring enabled by the development of new media technologies impact
the realms of economics, politics, and culture. He has written numerous articles
and book chapters on topics including interactive media, surveillance, digital art,
and reality tv. He is the author of Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing
the Way We Think and Know (2013), iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era
(2007), and Reality tv: The Work of Being Watched (2003).

Paisley Currah is professor of political science and women’s and gender studies
at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Currah is a founding editor, with Susan Stryker, of tsq: Transgender Studies Quar-
terly. He is coeditor of Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge
(2011) and Transgender Rights (2006). Among the articles he has published are
“Homonationalism, State Rationalities, and Sex Contradictions” (Theory and Event,
2013) and “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Gender Non-­conforming
Bodies at the Airport” (Social Research, 2011). His book States of Sex: Regulating
Transgender Identities (forthcoming) looks at contradictions in state definitions
of sex.

Sayantani DasGupta is assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at Columbia

University and teaches in both the Columbia University graduate program in narra-
tive medicine and the graduate program in health advocacy at Sarah Lawrence Col-
lege. She is the co-­chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Narrative, Health
and Social Justice and a faculty fellow in the Columbia Center for the Study of
Social Difference. She is the author of many book chapters and scholarly articles
on medical education, reproduction, race, and surrogacy, and is the coeditor of an
award-­winning collection of women’s illness narratives, Stories of Illness and Heal-
ing: Women Write Their Bodies (2007). She is also coeditor, with Shamita Das Das-
gupta, of Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India: Outsourcing Life (2014).

Shamita Das Dasgupta is a cofounder of Manavi, an organization in the United

States that focuses on violence against women in the South Asian community. She
has taught at Rutgers University and in the clinical law program at the New York
University School of Law. In addition to publishing multiple articles in her areas
of specialization—ethnicity, gender, immigration, and violence against women—
she has written several books: The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folk-
tales (1995), A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America (1998),
Body Evidence: Intimate Violence against South Asian Women in America (2007), and
Mothers for Sale: Women in Kolkata’s Sex Trade (2009). Her most recent book, which
she co-­edited with Sayantani DasGupta, is Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy
in India: Outsourcing Life (2014).

Rachel E. Dubrofsky is associate professor in the Department of Communi-

cation at the University of South Florida. Her work is rooted in a critical/cultural
studies tradition, with a focus on digital culture (television, social media), and an
emphasis on the role of surveillance and issues of race and gender. Her book The
Surveillance of Women on Reality Television: Watching The Bachelor and The Bache-
lorette, explores how the surveillance context of a TV program impacts gendered
and racialized bodies. Her work has appeared in such journals as Critical Studies in
Media Communication; Communication Theory; Communication, Culture and Critique;
and Feminist Media Studies. She is currently working on a book, Under Surveillance:
Mediating Race and Gender, examining the cultural shift from older digital media
(tv, film) to newer digital media (social networking sites) with an emphasis on sur-
veillance, race, and gender.

Rachel Hall is associate professor of communication studies at Louisiana State

University. Her book Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture (2009) pro-
vides a history and cultural critique of practices surrounding “wanted” posters for

266 Contributors
outlaws and of the everyday performances of vigilante viewership elicited by the
posters. She is currently completing The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and
Culture of Airport Security (2015). She has also begun work on a cultural history of
child safety in North America. Her essays have appeared in Performance Research,
Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Communication Review, Camera Obscura: Feminism,
Culture and Media Studies, and Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

Yasmin Jiwani is professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Con-

cordia University, Montreal. Her doctoral research, in communication studies, from
Simon Fraser University, examined issues of race and representation in Canadian
television news. Her research interests include mediations of race, gender, and vio-
lence in the context of war stories, femicide reporting in the press, and representa-
tions of women of color in popular and mainstream media. Her recent publications
include “Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender, and Violence” (Canadian
Journal of Political Science, 2007), as well as the collection Girlhood: Redefining the
Limits (2005, coedited with Candis Steenbergen and Claudia Mitchell). Her work
has appeared in Social Justice, Violence Against Women, Canadian Journal of Com-
munication, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Topia, International Journal of
Media and Cultural Politics, and the University of Toronto Quarterly, as well as in nu-
merous anthologies.

Laura Hyun Yi Kang is associate professor of Women’s Studies, English and

Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author
of Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (2002) and The Traffic
in Asian Women (forthcoming). She recently served as the editor of the theme unit
on “Sex,” in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film (2014, edited by Alex
Juhasz and Alisa Lebow). Kang has published essays in American Quarterly, Femi-
nist Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Vectors, Positions, and Visual Anthro-
pology Review.

Ummni Khan is associate professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at
Carleton University. Her research looks at the construction and regulation of stig-
matized sexual practices, with a particular focus on bdsm and sex work. Her book
Vicarious Kinks: Sadomasochism in the Socio-­Legal Imaginary (2014) examines the
ways criminal regulation of consensual sadomasochism rests on problematic ideo-
logical claims that engage psychiatry, antipornography feminism, and pop culture.
On the topic of sex work, she has written a number of articles, including “Prosti-
tuted Girls and the Grownup Gaze” (Global Studies of Childhood, 2011), “Running
in (to) the Family: Eight Short Stories about Sex Workers, Clients, Husbands, and
Wives” (Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law, 2011) and “‘Johns’ in the Spot-
light: Anti-­prostitution Efforts and the Surveillance of Clients” (forthcoming).

Shoshana Amielle Magnet is associate professor in the Institute of Women’s

Studies and the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. Her work
is on security, technologies, surveillance, and inequality. Some of the technologies
she studies are biometrics, radio frequency identification, backscatter X-­rays, as

Contributors 267
well as robotics, including robots used in the military. Her book When Biometrics
Fail: Race, Gender and the Technology of Identity (2011) examines the security state,
surveillance, identity, technology, and human rights.

Kelli Moore is currently the University of California President’s Postdoctoral

Fellow in Rhetoric at Berkeley. She earned her doctorate in communication at the
University of California, San Diego. Her research examines photographic and digi-
tal media in the production of visibility and speech in battered women, and situates
these practices and customs within ongoing debates about trauma theory, facili-
tated communication, visual literacy, and embodiment.

Lisa Jean Moore is a medical sociologist and professor of sociology and gender
studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. Her books include Buzz:
Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee (2013, with Mary Kosut), Gendered Bodies:
Feminist Perspectives (2010, with Judith Lorber), Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visi-
bility (2009, with Monica Casper), Sperm Counts: Understanding Man’s Most Precious
Fluid (2008), and The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural Readings (2010, co-
edited with Mary Kosut). Her newest collaboration, with Monica Casper, is The
Body: Social and Cultural Dissections (forthcoming). Her most recent scholarship
investigates the intraspecies relationships between humans and Limuli (Atlantic
horseshoe crabs).

Lisa Nakamura is Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of the Depart-

ment of American Cultures and the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual
Cultures of the Internet (2010), which won the Asian American Studies Association
2010 book award in cultural studies, and Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on
the Internet (2002). She is coeditor of Race in Cyberspace (2000, with Beth Kolko and
Gilbert Rodman) and Race After the Internet (2011, with Peter Chow-­White). She is
writing a monograph on social inequality in digital media culture, titled Workers
without Bodies: Towards a Theory of Race and Digital Labor.

Dorothy E. Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor,

George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie
Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylva-
nia, where she holds appointments in the Law School, the Department of Africana
Studies, and the Department of Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar,
public intellectual, and social-­justice advocate, she has written and lectured exten-
sively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader
in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare,
and bioethics. She is the author of the award-­winning books Killing the Black Body:
Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color
of Child Welfare (2002), as well as coeditor of six books on constitutional law and
gender. She has also published more than eighty articles and essays in books and
scholarly journals, including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford

268 Contributors
Law Review. Her latest book is Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business
Re-­create Race in the Twenty-­First Century (2011).

Andrea Smith is associate professor of media and cultural studies at the Uni-
versity of California, Riverside. Her publications include Native Americans and the
Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (2008) and Conquest: Sexual
Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005). She is coeditor, with Audra Simpson,
of Theorizing Native Studies (2014). She is also the editor of The Revolution Will Not
Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (2009), and coeditor of The Color
of Violence: The Incite! Anthology. Smith is a cofounder of Incite! Women of Color
Against Violence and of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association.

Kevin Walby is assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Win-

nipeg. His recent articles appear in the British Journal of Criminology, Policing and
Society, Law and Social Inquiry, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Urban Studies, Quali-
tative Inquiry, Sociology, Current Sociology, and International Sociology. He is the au-
thor of Touching Encounters: Sex, Work, and Male-­for-­Male Internet Escorting (2012).
He is co-­editor of Emotions Matter: A Relational Approach to Emotions (2012, with
Alan Hunt and Dale Spencer), Brokering Access: Power, Politics, and Freedom of Infor-
mation Process in Canada (2012, with Mike Larsen), and Policing Cities: Urban Securi-
tization and Regulation in the Twenty-­first Century (2013, with Randy K. Lippert).
He is coauthor of Municipal Corporate Security in International Context (2014, with
Randy K. Lippert).

Megan M. Wood is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at

the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research interests include digi-
tal media, television, feminism, race, and popular and consumer culture. Her work
focuses on social media, attending to how posts, interactions, and discussions in
these spaces articulate race, gender, sexuality, and class, and concomitant issues of
inequality. She has published articles in journals including Communication Studies,
Review of Communication, and Sexuality and Culture.

Contributors 269
 INDEX

Abbott, Grace, 49–51, 56 134–35; with medical conditions or

Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk, 133–34, disabilities, 142, 144–46; privacy
138–41 concerns of, 146–47; sexualization
aboriginal peoples. See native peoples of, 137–38; treated as potential ex-
abortion, 176–78; anti-abortion cam- plosives, 141; vanity of, 135–36; vol-
paigns, 158; sex-selective, 167n13 untary transparency of, 129, 131–32,
advocacy research, 195, 196, 199 133
aesthetics of transparency, 115, 116, Alexander, Jacqui, 25
148, 152, 153–54; of Rihanna, algorithms, xv–xvi, 59; neutrality of,
120–21; of the U.S. security state, xii–xiii, xvii
127–29, 133–34, 164; veiled bodies Allard, Patricia, 32
and, 163 Alloula, Mallek, 163
Afghan communities: culture and tra- Amazon.com, xvi
ditions, 79, 85, 88; surveillance of, American Social Hygiene Association
87 (asha), 51–53
AfroSpear, 205 Americans with Disabilities Act (1990),
agency: of Muslim women, 167n17; 144–45
race and, 11, 99–100, 103, 104, 136; Anaïs, Seantel, xi, 6
sexual display and, 100, 101, 103; Andrejevic, Mark, 223
of surrogates, 161–62, 163, 167n8; Andrew, Elizabeth Wheeler, 45–46
Twitter use and, 93–94, 98–99, 104 animality, 129–31
air passengers: full-body scanners of, Anthias, Floya, 90
antiprostitution feminism, 6, 189–90, birthers, 62
204, 207 black women. See women of color
antitrafficking: history, 39–40; League Blanchard, Natalie, 13, 222, 224–25
of Nations efforts, 41–43, 55–56; blogs: activism on, 225–27; AfroSpear,
organizations, 45–46; racial group- 205; Feminist Frequency, 224–25;
ing and, 53–55; White Slave Traffic fetal images posted on, 154, 159–
Agreements, 46–47 60, 162; images of surrogate belly
antiviolence movements, 31–36, 89 bumps on, 160–62, 163; of intended
Asch, Adrienne, 179 parents (ips), 150, 152–53, 157–58,
Asian women, 44, 53–55 166nn4–5
assimilation, 29 bodies: as borders, 89–90, 128; celeb-
Atkins, J. D. C., 28–29 rity, 93–94; digital, 96; identity,
Atwood, Margaret, 165, 169 8, 9; Muslim, 11, 84, 90; of native
authenticity, call to, 98–99, 101 peoples, 27; “normal,” 23, 90, 133;
power and, 86, 90; precarious, 86,
backscatter x-rays, 5, 17n1, 134, 163–64; 89; terrorist, 139, 141; virtual, 222;
discontinued use of, 147, 149n11; vulnerability of, 5, 9, 91, 206. See
privacy concerns of, 147; safety also veiled bodies
tests, 149n10 borders: bodies as, 89–90, 128; out-
Barlow, John Perry, 221, 222 sourcing, 90–91, 133; surveillance
Bernstein, Elizabeth, 6, 191, 202, 204 at, 8, 40–41, 44, 53
Best, Joel, 193, 194, 196 boyd, danah, 222
Bhabha, Homi, 29 Brodwin, Paul P., 158
Bhattacharjee, Anannya, 32, 38n5 brothels, 14, 45, 46, 169
BiDil, 175 Brown, Jayna, 122
biometric technologies, 13, 221, 223; Browne, Simone, 13
binary codes, 15; racial and gender Bruyneel, Kevin, 29
preconceptions of, xv, 15; testing on Bureau of Social Hygiene (bsh), 50–51
prisoners, 9 Bush, George W., 37
biopolitics, 128; Foucault on, 22–23; Bushnell, Katharine, 45–46
racial dimension of, 131; Rose’s Butler, Josephine, 45
analysis of, 180, 182; settler colo- Butler, Judith, 37, 86
nialism and, 23
biopower, 23, 24, 62, 110 Campbell, Marie, 219
biotechnologies, 14, 165; in prison sys- Can We See the Baby Bump Please?
tem, 204, 205; race-based, 171–72, (Surabhi), 162
176, 184–85 carceral feminism, 6, 191, 202–3
birth certificates: dual function of, Cartwright, Lisa, 96, 108, 115, 120
63; fraud and, 65–66; “no gen- categories: biological, 175, 176, 184–85;
der” designation on, 66–67, 68; the biometric, 15; and classifications in
state and, 61–62; surveillance of, text, 218–19, 220; crime, 200–201;
8; of transgender people, 68–74; of of discrimination, xiii–xiv, 5; gen-
transsexual people, 58–59, 64–67 der, 8, 61, 63–67, 75, 213–14; of
birth control, 181, 182 human hierarchy, 110; for native

272 Index
 peoples, 24; power and, 208, 210; Darling, Marsha, 170
vital statistic, 61–62, 67 DasGupta, Sayantani, 14
celebrities: agency of, 94, 104; female Dasgupta, Shamita Das, 14
bodies of, 93–94; gossip articles, data mining, xiii–xv
95–96; pregnancies, 160; Twitter ac- Dawes Allotment Act, 28, 29
tivities, 99–103, 104–6, 223 Deer, Sarah, 37
child abuse, 30 DelVecchio, Marina, 151
Chow, Rey, 131 Demand Abolition Project, 194, 202
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 118 democracy, 37–38
citizenship: biological, 178; fetal, 158; digital persona, 120
of native peoples, 27–29; privileges disabled people: airport screening of, 5,
of, 13, 224; prosthetic, 88 142, 144–46; genetic screening and,
civilization discourse, 85 13–14, 171, 176–77, 183; parenting
civil liberties, 37 concerns of, 179–80, 186n22
Clarke, Roger, 120 discrimination: categories of, xiii–xiv,
Collins, Patricia Hill, 103 5; against disabled people, 145, 171,
colonialism: biopolitics of, 23; civiliz- 179; racial therapeutics and, 175; of
ing strategies, 27–30; gender/sexual surveillance practices, 217; systemic
violence of, 24, 26–27, 31, 35; Indian forms of, 10, 16; against trans-
surrogacy and, 156; seeing and gender people, 67
not-seeing of, 25–26; surveillance Disturbia (Ibrahim), 108, 116–19, 123
studies and, 21–22; surveillance documentation, surveillance: driver’s
technologies and, 7 licenses, 61, 71, 74; passports, 60.
communication: facilitated, 108; non- See also birth certificates; text,
verbal, 115–16 ­surveillance
community-accountability models, domestic violence: governmentality,
36–37, 38n7 107, 109–10, 113, 120, 123; incar-
Comparing Sex Buyers with Men Who ceration of women and, 5–6; police
Don’t Buy Sex (Prostitution Re- photography of, 108–9, 111–16, 119;
search and Education), 194, 195–96, Rihanna’s interview on, 119–23;
198–99, 202–5, 207 shelters for, 33–34; statistics, 81, 88
compulsory able-bodiedness, 133 Down syndrome, 14, 174, 176–78
Consalvo, Mia, 224 Dubrofsky, Rachel E., 11, 98, 223, 224–
consumption, 12, 99, 101, 136; of surro- 26
gates, 157, 160 Dworkin, Andrea, 194
Contagious Disease Acts, 39–40, 45 Dyer, Richard, 113, 116
Corea, Gena, 14, 169 dystopias, reproductive: of the 1980s,
criminalization: of communities of 169, 171; contemporary, 172, 176,
color, 7–8; of public space, 202; of 184
sex industry, 6, 189–91, 199–201,
202–5, 206; of women of color, 1 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 178
Crowdy, Rachel, 53, 56 Electronic Privacy Information Center
Currah, Paisley, 8, 60 (epic), 149n10
Cyrus, Miley, 94, 99–101 emasculation, 139

Index 273
Ericson, Richard V., 156, 165; on sur- fetal images: in advertising, 167n11;
veillant assemblages, 153, 157 online viewing of, 156, 159–62, 162;
eugenics, 51–52, 180–82, 186n23 sex-selective abortion and, 167n13;
exnomination, 90 ultrasound, 154, 158–59
exploitation, 46, 198, 199; of Indian Fichte, J. G., 72
surrogates, 155–56 Finn, Jonathan, 110
Finn, Rachel L., 89–90
Facebook, 106n1, 223; Blanchard case, Food and Drug Administration (fda),
13, 222, 224–25; race and class and, 175, 179
94, 227n2; real-name requirements, Forchhammer, Fröken, 56
222 foster care, 181
Fanon, Frantz, 168n17 Foucault, Michel, 2, 151, 157; biopolitics
Farley, Melissa, 190, 193, 197–99, 207n3 and biopower, 22–23, 110; definition
Fat, Ugly or Slutty, 226–27 of panopticism, 82
Feldman, Allen, 83 Fuchs, Christian, 209, 210–11
female grotesque, the: cave metaphor full-body scanners: for detecting explo-
of, 135–36; fatphobia and, 142; sives, 138–41; disabilities and, 142,
would-be terrorist as, 138–39, 141 144; humiliation of, 141–42, 143;
femicide, 80, 81, 85, 91 inequalities of, 5; installation in U.S.
femininity: stereotypes, 99; terror- airports, 17n1, 149n11; millimeter-
ist bodies and, 139; visual codes of, wave vs. backscatter machines,
123; whiteness and, 108, 111, 113, 134–35; passenger submission to,
116, 118 131–32, 133; science fictional refer-
feminism: carceral, 6, 191, 202–3; pro- ences to, 11–12, 137; sexualization
hibitionist and antiprostitution, 6, of, 12, 137, 148; sexual privacy and,
189–91, 204, 206–7; surveillance 146–47; vanity and, 135–36
studies and, 208–9, 220
feminist media studies, 10, 16, 209 Gabriel, John, 90
feminist movement, 6, 189, 208 gaze: actuarial, 83, 86, 92; colonial,
feminist praxis, 5, 15; concept, 3–4 25–26; community, 203; of intended
feminist surveillance studies, 1, 153, parents (ips), 161, 164–65; photo-
191, 208–9; institutional ethnogra- graphic, 111, 113; of veiled women,
phy (IE) approach to, 210, 214–19, 163, 168n17. See also male gaze
220 gender: definition, 63–64; feminist
Fenty, Rihanna. See Rihanna praxis and, 4; fraud, 65–66, 72, 75;
Fergie (Black Eyed Peas), 100–101 identity, 8, 58–61, 74–75; injustice,
Ferguson, Kathy E., 208, 213–14 207; negotiation of, 60, 68–69; re-
Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 23, 113, 123; assignment, 69–71, 74–75; social
analytics of raciality, 107–8, 109– media use by, 223
10, 122 General Abolitionist Federation, 45
fertility clinics: financial barriers of, Genetics and ivf Institute, 174
177, 186n18; Indian, 151, 155, 157; genetic testing: funding for, 177–78; of
marketing and services, 173–76; newborn babies, 13–14; preimplan-
media coverage of, 172–73 tation genetic diagnosis (pgd),

274 Index
 169–70, 177, 183, 186n19; prenatal Homeland Security, Department of
testing, 176–77, 179, 186n17; priva- (dhs), 149n10
tization of, 179; race-based, 174–76; honor killings, 81, 85–86, 90–91, 92n1;
reasons for doing, 179–80; screen- antiviolence organizations and, 89.
ing for disease, 183 See also Shafia murders
Gilchrist, Kristen, 81 hooks, bell, 7, 10
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 22 Houston ivf, 174
Globe and Mail, 81, 92nn2–3 human difference, 109–11, 122
Glynn, Kevin, 115 Human Genome Project, 175
Goffman, Erving, 66 Hussein, Saddam, 129–30
Goodwin, Charles, 114–15 Hymans, Paul, 41
Google, xvi, xviii; reaction to hypervisibility, 7, 11, 25, 128; femicide
“Scroogled” campaign, xii and, 80
Google Glass, xv
Goulding, Warren, 81 Ibrahim, Sham, 133; Disturbia, 108,
governance: indigenous systems of, 27; 116–19, 123
neoliberal, 176, 179–80, 181, 183; re- immigration: of prostitutes, 44, 46;
flexive, 129, 136, 138 racial purity and, 45, 51–52
Grant, Melissa G., 203 Indian women. See surrogates, Indian
Griffith, Alison I., 215 indigenous peoples. See native peoples
infant mortality rates, 170–71
Haggerty, Kevin D., 156, 165; definition informational profile, 9
of surveillance, 191, 211; on surveil- information gathering, 210–12, 216
lant assemblages, 153, 157; on sur- information society, 210
veys and statistical analyses, 192, institutional ethnography (ie), 209–10,
199 214–19
Hall, Rachel, 4, 11, 13, 99, 101; aesthet- intelligence studies, 209, 211–13
ics of transparency, xviii, 14, 153– interiority and exteriority, 127; of sur-
54, 156; on the normalized body, 90 rogates, 154, 156, 157, 162
Halsey, Ashley, 147 International Bureau (ib), 46, 48
Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood), 165, 169 Internet, 222, 224–25, 227n2
Hansen, Mark, 222 invisibility. See visibility and invisibility
Hartman, Saidiya, 32 Ishaq, Shaima, 91
Health Insurance Portability and Ac- Islam, 80, 84–86, 92n1
countability Act of 1996 (hipaa),
144–45 James, George, 64
Hershatter, Gail, 48 Jeffries, Sheila, 194
Hershey, Laura, 182 Jiwani, Yasmin, 7, 11, 128
heteronormativity, 24, 91, 147, 151, 204 Johnson, Bascom, 51, 52–53, 57n4
heteropatriarchy: the state and, 25, 38; Johnson v. Calvert, 173
white supremacy and, 7, 23–24 Jorgensen, Christine, 64
heterosexuality, 14, 133
hierarchies, 110, 169, 170–71, 213 Kang, Laura Hyun Yi, 8, 10
Holland, Janet, 193, 194 Kaplan, Amy, 37

Index 275
Kaplan, Anne, 97 208, 224–26; on body scanners, 142,
Karande and Associates, 174 163; on outsourcing the border,
Kardashian, Kim: body and sexuality, 90–91, 133; surveillant scopophilia
94, 102–3; racialization of, 101–2 concept, 12, 137
Kazanjian, David, 35 male gaze: agency and, 98–99; airport
Khan, Ummni, xi, 6, 40 security and, 136, 148; invitation
Kinsie, Paul, 53 of, 10, 11, 98, 101, 104; Mulvey’s
Kipling, Rudyard, 88, 92n3 concept, 10, 96–98; race and, 11,
Klum, Heidi, 101 99–103, 136; studies on, 151
Knepper, Paul, 42–43, 53 Mammy image, 107, 111
knowledge practices, 213–14 Maranger, Robert, 85
Koyama, Emi, 33–34 Marie Claire, 150–51
Marilyn Diptych (Warhol), 116, 118–19
Laarhuis, Gerard, 85 marital status, 62, 76n3
Ladies National Association (lna), 45 Marx, Gary, 209, 210–11
land expropriation, 26, 28 masculinity, 25, 115, 139; deviance and,
Laughlin, Harry, 186n23 191
League of Nations: Advisory Commit- Mathiesen, Thomas, 82, 202–3
tee on the Traffic in Women and Mattelart, Armand, 8
Children, 42, 48, 56; Commission of Mbembe, Achille, 23
Enquiry into Traffic in Women and McKittrick, Katherine, 103
Children in the East (1932), 42–43, McNeil, Laurie, 153
53–54; International Conference McRuer, Robert, 133
on the Traffic in Women and Chil- media: consumers, 141; coverage of
dren, 41; International Convention terrorism, 128, 129–30; coverage of
for the Suppression of the Traffic in transgender people, 67, 73; digital,
Women and Children, 42, 47; Re- 94, 118; femicide stories, 81; fer-
port of the Special Body of Experts on tility clinic stories, 172–74; newer
Traffic in Women and Children (1927), vs. older, 13; panopticism of, 82, 85,
42–43, 45, 52–53; trafficking ques- 91; promotion of genetic technolo-
tionnaire, 47 gies, 172; race and, 81; reporting on
Leppanen, Karina, 56 Muslims, 79–80, 84–85, 87; studies,
Levine, Philippa, 44, 56n1 10, 16, 209. See also social media
Limoncelli, Stephanie, 56 medical examinations: of prostitutes
Loomis, George, 124n6 for venereal diseases, 39, 44–45, 51,
Lowman, J., 206 56n1; of Saddam Hussein, 129–30
Lowry, Deborah Wilson, 152, 153–54 Meiners, Erica, 202
Lyon, David, 38n3, 59, 156, 213; defini- men of color, 6, 205
tion of surveillance, 2, 22, 24, 211; Merry, Sally Engle, 107–11, 114
on surveillance studies, 25, 31 Metzger, Barbara, 57n5
Meyerowitz, Joanne, 64
MacKenzie, Donald A., 181 Microsoft, 227; “Scroogled” campaign,
Magnet, Shoshana Amielle, xv, 97, 131, xii

276 Index
millimeter-wave machines, 134–35, Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act, 13
147, 149n11 New York City Department of Health
Million, Dian, 30 (doh), 64
miscegenation, 62 New York City Department of Health
Mnookin, Jennifer, 108 and Mental Hygiene (dohmh):
monitoring practices: of nurses, 219; Board of Health, 72–73; Health
in organizations, 210, 213–14, 216; Code, 67; no-surgery proposal for
of transnational movements of transgender people, 72–74; Trans-
women, 46–47 gender Advisory Committee, 68–72,
monitoring technologies: power and, 75n2
xi, xvii; uses and abuses of, xiii New Yorker, 137, 138, 141–42, 143
Monroe, Marilyn, 116, 118, 124n6 New York Times, 35, 73, 134, 178; “The
Moore, Kelli D., 8, 12, 129 Fertility Market” article, 173; report
Moore, Lisa Jean, 8 on digital photography, 118, 124n9
Morgensen, Scott, 22, 24 New York Times Magazine, 174
Mother Machine, The (Corea), 169 Noriel, Gerard, 63
Mulvey, Laura, 10, 96–98 normalizing logics, 22–23, 28, 31
Muslim immigrants, 80, 90, 92 not-seeing practices: in photographing
Muslim women: agency of, 168n17; skin color, 122–23; of settler colo-
media portrayal of, 84–85; “outing” nialism, 22, 25–26
of, 163; screening technologies and,
5; surveillance of, 80; as threats and Obama, Barack, 62
victims, 91–92 Olwan, Dana M., 81, 89
Mykitiuk, Roxanne, 179 opacity effects, 127–28, 129, 141
Oprah Winfrey Show, 166n1
National Institute of Standards and orientalism, 87, 139, 151, 166n2
Technology (nist), 149n10 Ott, James, 146
National Security Agency (nsa), x Our Family, Made in India (Heine-
National Vigilance Association (nva), mann), 161–62
46
native peoples: civilizing strategies Pacific Fertility Center, 174
of, 27–29; gender/sexual violence Packer, Jeremy, 141
among, 30–31, 35; heteropatri- Pande, Amrita, 155, 156–57, 159, 167n7
archy/patriarchy and, 26–27; lack of panopticons, 2, 82, 86, 153
media attention, 81; as “rapeable,” 7, Parens, Erik, 179
16, 24; sexual surveillance of, 21–22; Parks, Lisa, 132
women’s organizations, 89 Pascoe, Peggy, 62
Nazi Germany, 23 Patel, Nayna, 158
neoliberalism: privatization and gover- patriarchy: native communities and,
nance and, 129, 171, 176, 179, 180– 26–27; in perception of Muslim
81, 183; racial inequality and, 184–85 men, 80, 84; power, 90
neutrality: in data collection, xii–xiii; penal abolition, 1, 6, 17n2
transparency and, 133 Philadelphia Inquirer, 181

Index 277
photography: Abdulmutallab under- 207; founding and goals, 190, 194;
wear exhibit, 139–41; of battered overview of reports, 190, 192–93;
women of color, 8, 12, 114–15, 122– statistical claims, 199–202; surveys
23; of black nursemaids, 111; digital and research methods, 195–98, 206;
vs. Polaroid, 114, 124n9; fetal, 158– webpage, 193–94
60; pregnant belly images, 160–62; “prosumer” concept, 13
of Rihanna’s injuries, 108–9, 111–14; Puar, Jasbir, 9, 131, 139
technology, 110 publicity, 118
Pistole, John, 146 public protection, 65–66
Pliley, Jessica, 48, 57n6 public-shaming strategies, 202–3
policing: bodies, 154; colonial, 25; of Pugliese, Joseph, 86, 88–89
Muslim communities, 80; online,
225, 226, 227; sex industry, 46, 190; race: agency and, 11, 99–100, 103, 104,
studies, 209, 211–13; surrogate mo- 136; as a biological category, 175,
bility, 159; by women, 8; in women’s 176, 184–85; biometric technolo-
shelters, 33–34 gies and, 15; fertility clinics and,
population control, 170–71, 180–82 170, 173–76, 179; in/visibility of, 92;
postfeminism, 99, 101, 104; voluntary media reporting of, 81; pharma-
transparency and, 136, 138 ceuticals based on, xiv, 175–76; as
poverty: agency and, 167n8; criminal- a technology strategy, 123, 124n8;
ization and, 6, 200; of women of violence and, 7
color, 181–82 raciality, analytics of, 107–10, 120, 122
power: bodies and, 86, 90; in classifi- racialization: black women performers
cation and categorization practices, and, 122; boundaries, 89–90; of
208, 210; information collection Kim Kardashian, 101–3; of native
and, xii; media, 82; patriarchal, 90; peoples, 24; police photographs
race and, 110, 118, 129, 181; rela- and, 108–9; stereotypes, 163
tions in organizations, 213–14; racial purity, 45, 52, 62, 172
state, 8, 69, 84, 89, 110; surveillance racism: biopolitical, 23; of carceral poli-
and, x–xi, 220, 224 tics, 204–5; scientific apparatus of,
prison: biometric technology testing 108, 110; video game, 225, 226. See
in, 9, 204; racial disparity in, 181, also racialization
206; surveillance practices in, 2; Radar Online, 100, 102
women of color in, 5 Ramazanoglu, Caroline, 193, 194
privacy: airport screening process and, Rankin, Janet, 219
144–46; bodily, 15; inequality, 32; Raphael, Jody, 196–97
loss of, 37; online, 226–27; rights, 4, Rapp, Rayna, 169–70
149n12; surveillance studies on, 31 Razack, Sharlene, 3, 85–87
privatization, 171, 176, 179, 183 reality tv, 12–13, 98
professional vision, 114–15 reproductive choice, 171, 176–78, 182,
prostitution. See sex industry clients; 183
sex work Reproductive Genetics Institute, 174
Prostitution Research and Education Reproductive Health Specialists, 174
(pre): carceral strategies, 202–5, reproductive technologies: assisted

278 Index
 (arts), 154, 155, 169; individual re- Sarkeesian, Anita, 224–25
sponsibility for, 178–79; marketing, Sawyer, Diane, 119–22
173–76, 182; race and, 14, 169–72, Sawyer, Thomas, 144
172–76, 183–85; as surveillant as- scanners. See backscatter x-rays; full-
semblages, 152, 153–54; ultrasound body scanners; millimeter-wave
technology, 154, 158–60, 167n13, machines
174; in vitro fertilization (ivf), 14, Schmidt, Eric, xvii–xviii
172, 177. See also genetic testing; re- Schroeder, L. O., 63
progenetics; surrogates, Indian Schwartz, Stephen, 71–73
reprogenetics: individual responsi- Scully, Eileen, 44, 46
bility and, 171–72; marketing to security culture: airport, 130–31, 136;
women of color, 172, 176; neoliber- normalcy and, 133; of terrorism pre-
alism and, 176, 178, 182, 183; pro- vention, 128, 129, 132, 148
cess, 169–70 security studies, 209, 211–13
research methods: institutional See, Sarita, 26
ethnography (ie) method, 214–19; sex industry clients: criminalization
knowledge and, 195; by Prostitu- of, 199–201, 202–5, 206; as devi-
tion Research and Education (pre), ants, 190–91, 206–7; stigmatization
195–98, 206; in surveillance studies, of, 190, 198, 203; surveillance of,
209, 210–11 189; surveys, 195–96, 198
resistance, practices of, 121–22 sex-offender registries (sor), 202–3
Rich, Adrienne, 133 sex ratio, 167n13
Rifkin, Mark, 22, 23–24 sexual perversity, 24–25
Rihanna, 102; Disturbia portrait, 116– sex work: compared to slavery, 205;
19; interview on 20/20, 108, 119–23, criminalization of, 6, 189, 191;
133; police photographs of, 108–15 rights advocates, 6, 189–90; stigma-
Rinehart Center for Reproductive tization, 206; surrogacy compared
Medicine, 173 to, 167n6. See also sex industry
Ritchie, Andrea, 32 clients; trafficking
Roberts, Dorothy E., xiv, 14 Shafia murders: media coverage, 7,
Robertson, Craig, 60 79–80, 81, 82–83, 84–85; surveil-
Rockefeller, John D., 50 lance used, 82; trial accounts,
Rodgers, Tara, 142, 163, 208 87–88; visibility of, 83–84
Roe v. Wade, 178 Shapiro, Deborah L., 196–97
Rose, Nikolas, 128, 178–79, 180–82 shared information, access to, xv–xvi
Rothman, Barbara Katz, 165, 182 Shearer-Cremean, Christine, 108
Rule, James, 215 Sheen, Charlie, 105
Russo, Mary, 135, 141 Sher Institutes for Reproductive Medi-
cine, 74, 173
Sachs, Andrea, 135–37 Shohat, Ella, 130
Said, Edward, 29, 87 Simpson, O. J., 115
Saldaña-Portillo, Maria Josefina, 25 single-parent families, 215
same-sex marriage, 69 skin color, 111, 113–15, 122–23
Sanders, Teela, 198 Skotko, Brian, 177

Index 279
Smith, Andrea, 5, 7; not-seeing prac- Superman, 137
tices, 6, 122–23 surrogates, Indian: advertising for,
Smith, Dorothy, 6, 210; on texts in or- 150–51; blogs by intended parents
ganizations, 209, 213, 214–15, 220 (ips), 150, 152–53, 159–62, 166nn4–
Snow, William F., 51 5; costs and earnings, 155, 167nn7–
Snowden, Edward, x 8; headless or veiled images of, 154,
social control, 192, 202, 204, 212 156, 160–62, 164–66; online com-
social media: alternative platforms, munications with, 155–56; process,
223–24; fertility clinic websites, 151, 156–57, 166n3; surveillance of,
173–74; harassment on, 224–27; 14, 157–58
qualitative studies on, 106n1; real- surveillance: abusers, 1; as an active
name requirements for, 222; sur- social process, 89; definitions, x, 2,
veillance function of, 224; synopti- 22, 131, 210–11; of disability, 13–14;
cons of, 82, 91; women’s agency and, foundational structures of, 7; mana-
93. See also blogs; Facebook; Twitter gerial practices and, 214; material
social-purity reformers, 46, 50 relations of, 217–19, 220; old and
somatechnics, 86–88 new forms of, 191–92; in organiza-
Spears, Britney, 101 tions, 213–19; outsourcing of, 91, 92;
Stabile, Carol A., 81, 158 of pregnant women, 176; society,
Stam, Robert, 130 156, 192, 210
Stannard, David, 21 surveillance studies: colonialism and,
state: birth certificates and, 61–63, 14, 21–23, 25–26; conceptual and
74; carceral, 205, 206; colonial and methodological clarity in, 209–10,
postcolonial, 21–22, 25–27; domes- 210–13, 219–20; feminist approach
tic abuse and, 109, 113; eugenics to, 3–4, 6, 7, 9, 15–16, 36, 225; power
and, 180, 181–82; gender standards, relations and, xi–xii, 210; scholar-
59–60, 63–64, 74–75; modern, ship, 2, 4; “seeing” and, 25–26; use
22–23; police, 72; power, 8, 69, 84, of surveys in, 191–92. See also femi-
89, 110; reproductive choices and, nist surveillance studies
182–83; response to violence, 5–6, 7, surveillant assemblages: concept, 153,
31–36; security, 127–29, 133–34, 137, 157, 162; Puar on, 9; reproductive
142, 146–47; surveillance practices/ technologies as, 152, 153–54
strategies, 7, 9, 14, 30–31, 34–38 surveillant scopophilia, 12, 137
state-building process, 48 surveys, 191–92, 195
stereotypes: of black women, 171; of synopticons, 82, 86, 91, 203
disabled people, 180; of femininity,
99; of veiled bodies, 163 Taylor, Janelle, 167n11
stigmatization: of Muslim women, 80; terrorism: prevention, 128–29, 131–32,
of prostitution, 206; of sex clients, 148; threats of, 127–28, 164
190, 198, 203; of surrogates, 151 terrorists: Abdulmutallab’s failed at-
Sturken, Marita, 96, 148n3 tack, 138–41; bodies, 14; the look of,
suicidegirls.com, 97 9, 89; protection from, 136
Sulmers, Claire, 122 text, surveillance, 209, 213, 214–19, 220
Sundquist, Alma, 52 Thompson, Rosmarie Garland, 133

280 Index
tmz, 105, 115–16, 121 authenticity of, 98; celebrities on,
trafficking: Asian women, 53–55; com- 99–101, 223; consumer-producer as-
pulsory medical examinations, 39, pect of, 97; male vs. female activity
44–45, 51, 56n1; investigations, on, 104–6; user statistics, 95
49–53; migration/immigration and, Tyler, Imogen, 93
44–45, 51–52; monitoring and re-
porting, 48–49, 57n3; surveillance ultrasound technology, 154, 158–60,
of, 8, 39–41; transnational move- 167n13, 174
ment, 47. See also antitrafficking; universal justice, 115, 116, 118, 122
sex work Unlike Us, 223
Transgender Advisory Committee US Weekly, 100
(tac), 61 utopias, 185; digital, 222, 224, 227
transgender people: airport screening
of, 5; birth certificates for, 68–69; Vachss, Alice, 204
gender reassignment, 69–71; iden- Van Dijk, José, 132
tity, 61, 68; no-surgery proposal Vanity Fair, 160
for, 72–75; rights advocates, 59–60, veiled bodies: of Indian surrogates, 151,
67–71 154, 156, 160–62, 164–66; of Muslim
transnational surrogacy: advertising, women, 163, 167n17
150–51, 166n1; compared to sex venereal disease, 39–40, 44–45, 51
work, 167n6; industry, 155, 167n7; video games, 224–26, 227
informational networks, 155–56, violence: in advertising, 151; collec-
159; process and politics, 151, 154, tive forms of resistance to, 16, 225,
166n3. See also surrogates, Indian 226; colonial, 22, 26; in communi-
transparency: of bodies, 14, 129, 135; ties of color, 7; gendered, 31–35,
chic, 132, 142; in Internet searches, 79–81, 86, 91; to native peoples,
xvi; police as arbiters of, 119; in 24, 30–31; prostitution and, 194;
research, 196–97; voluntary, 129, protection from, 35; publicity and,
131–32, 133, 136, 138, 144. See also 118; sex buyers and, 200–202, 203,
aesthetics of transparency 206–7; social media and, 224–25;
Transportation Security Administra- state response to, 5–6, 7; sur-
tion (tsa): guidelines for human vivors of, 34–35, 36, 38n7; of white
screeners, 132; privacy concerns supremacy, 205. See also domestic
and, 15, 146–47; radiation exposure violence
and, 146, 149n10; screening pro- visibility and invisibility: actuarial gaze
cess for disabled passengers, 142, and, 83; of bodies, 11, 86–87, 90,
144–46; sexual harassment and, 12; 128; colonial state and, 25–26; com-
use of backscatter machines, 17n1, pulsory, 89, 92; of femicides, 81; of
147, 149n11 Indian surrogates, 165; liberatory
transsexual people: birth certificates, promise of, 40; of potential threats,
58–59, 64–67; fraud and, 72; history 80; resistant, 121
of, 64 visual display: of reality TV bodies, 12;
20/20 (tv program), 108, 119–23, 133 of women’s bodies, 10–12, 99–103,
Twitter: agency and, 11, 93, 103, 104; 105

Index 281
Walby, Kevin, xi, 6, 210, 219 ductive technologies and, 14, 169,
Walkowitz, Judith, 57n5 172–74; sentimentality toward black
Warhol, Andy, 116, 118–19 women, 111, 122; trafficking of, 40,
war on terror, 203; media images of, 42, 43, 46–47
128, 129; passenger-suspects and, Williams, Robert, 26
131, 136, 141, 148 Winfrey, Oprah, 166n1
Washington, Jesse, 227n2 Winkelmann, Carol L., 108
Washington Post, 135, 137, 144, 147 Wolfe, Patrick, 25, 27
wearable interfaces, xv–xvi women of color: agency of, 11, 103, 104,
Weheliye, Alexander, 23 136; childbearing and, 170–71, 181–
Weitzer, Ronald, 193, 196–97 82; performers, 122; photography
welfare, 32, 149n12, 177, 181; reform of, 8, 12, 114–15, 122–23; in prisons,
laws, 170–71 5; privacy rights, 32; reproductive
Wente, Margaret, 87 technologies and, 14, 169, 171–72,
Wexler, Laura, 111, 124n4 174–77, 183–85; as surrogates, 169,
whiteness: aesthetics of transparency 173, 184; Twitter activities of, 99
and, 8, 115; femininity and, 108, women’s shelters, 33–34
111, 113, 116, 118; normalization Wood, Megan M., 11, 98, 223
and, 7; photography and, 113–15; Wortley, Scott, 81
racialization and, 88, 102, 109–10,
122, 131–32; security and, 132; visual x-ray vision, 11–12, 137
codes of, 123
white supremacy, 38, 103, 123, 205; Yoshino, Kenji, 73
gender violence and, 26, 34; hetero- Young, Harvey, 113–14, 121
patriarchy and, 7, 23–24 Young, Roger, 204
white women: agency of, 11, 99–100, Yuval-Davis, Nira, 90
104, 136; feminism and, 104; repro-

282 Index