Call for Papers: Pleasures of Surveillance

Special Issue of Surveillance & Society
Edited by Drs. Stéfy McKnight (Carleton University) and Julia Chan
Submission deadline: August 1, 2022 for publication June 2023.

This special issue calls for scholarly and artistic contributions that theorize, identify, and investigate the relationships between surveillance and pleasure. Contributions will take up the critical and complex ways that surveillance and pleasure may entangle, where the product of this entanglement may be a source of empowerment, or a form of harm and control. Surveillance studies already provides some influential pleasure-related concepts, such as Hille Koskela’s important concept of “empowering exhibitionism,” John McGrath’s take on surveillance and performance, and David Bell’s reflection on sexual surveillance as a potentially cheeky form of resistance.[1] Borrowing from Angela Jones, we “define pleasure as infinitely different sets of gratifying social experiences. Pleasure is always subjective and contextual. Scholars must recognize that pleasure is a social experience, in which the body is caught up in what anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls ‘webs of significance’” (25).[2] As an experience rooted in the social, pleasure is therefore contingent and historically and culturally situated.

Surveillance is not just a specific event or structure; it is also a tool or technology, a methodology, a performance, logic, and a way of life or engaging with the world.[3] Surveillance is the process of collecting information and watching people, often with the goal of creating power dynamics that privilege the surveyor (Monahan & Murakami Wood, 2018, p. xx).[4] On one hand, considering pleasure may highlight forms of resistance and empowerment, such as in Black activist movements and 2SLBGTQIA+ resistance and radicalism.[5] According to adrienne maree brown, for example, “pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy” (13).[6] On the other, considering pleasure in relation to surveillance may also implicate varying forms of unwanted control and oppression, such as in voyeuristic uses of cameras like “creepshots” or “revenge porn” (Koskela 2002; Chan 2018),[7] or critique the ways in which pleasurable surveillance is folded into consumerist and commodity culture (e.g., Pokémon GO!; reality television; market surveillance; wearables; advertisements; and surveillance-based beauty tools like camera blackhead vacuums).

To explore this complexity, this issue seeks to bring together a constellation of scholars and artists who have engaged creatively and scholarly with theories of corporeal or affective pleasure in conversation with surveillance as methodology, tool, practice, and culture. We welcome submissions from both Global South and Global North perspectives, as well as those that challenge colonial, imperial, and western perspectives on and theories of pleasure and/or surveillance. We are particularly interested in work that centres the experiences and perspectives of historically marginalized groups. Through gathering a diverse range of perspectives in this special issue, we seek to develop a more granular, complex, and refined understanding of pleasure in relation to surveillance.

Some of the questions that we hope this special issue will answer include: What are some of the different ways that surveillance and/as/of pleasure can be situated historically and culturally? How is surveillance and/as/of pleasure experienced, and for whom is it pleasurable? What are the risks and harms of surveillance and/as/of pleasure? How is pleasure circumscribed by intersecting experiences of the subject, such as race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class? Can the pleasures of surveillance be mobilized for collective or systemic change? We invite contributions that, within the context of surveillance, examine pleasure from different vantages, including but not limited to the following.

Surveillance and pleasure, such as:

  • Critical readings of pleasure that engage questions of surveillance ethics, control, power, and/or specific cultural and geopolitical perspectives
  • Non-western, post- and de-colonial perspectives on surveillance and pleasure
  • Historical perspectives on surveillance and pleasure
  • Developing methodologies for studying surveillance and pleasure (autoethnography; creative research)
  • The implications of pleasurable surveillant platforms and interpersonal relationships (such as using dating apps) within the context of platform capitalism
  • Critiques of pleasurable surveillance in utopias/dystopias/imaginary futures in science fiction literature, film, or art

Surveillance as pleasure, such as:

  • Experiences of historically marginalized communities who may use technologies of sur/sousveillance for empowerment, activism, and resistance
  • Surveillance as forms of pleasurable play (entertainment, social media, children’s “spy” toys) and the commodification of surveillant pleasures and spectacles
  • Pleasurable social surveillance, such as gossip or Facebook neighbourhood groups, and their racial, gendered, or classed implications
  • The pleasures of online conspiracy theories and the political subject

     

Surveillance of pleasure, such as:

  • Policing pleasure and/or the criminalization of sexualities, drug use, or sex work
  • Neoliberal forms of self-surveillance, such as habit tracking and productivity tracking
  • The politics of surveilling sexual pleasure, such as voyeurism, teledildonics, or camming
  • Issues of pleasure in law and policy (sexual consent law; surveillance of online black-market activities)
  • Unwanted or abusive sexual surveillance, such as image-based sexual abuse (e.g. “revenge porn” or hidden camera)

Submission Information:

We welcome full academic papers, opinion pieces, review pieces, poetry and creative writing, artistic work, and audiovisual work. Submissions will undergo a peer-review and revision process prior to publication. Submissions should be original work, neither previously published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. All references to previous work by contributors should be masked in the text (e.g., “Author, 2015”).

All papers must be submitted through the online submission system no later than August 1, 2022 for publication June 2023.

Please submit the papers in a MS Word-compatible format. For further submission guidelines, please see: https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/about/submissions#authorguidelines

For all inquiries regarding the issue, please contact the editors: Julia Chan <julia.chan@protonmail.com> and Stéfy McKnight <stefy.mcknight@carleton.ca>.

The Editors

Stéphanie McKnight (STÉFY) is a queer femme of centre white settler artist-scholar based in Katarokwi/Kingston Ontario, and Assistant Professor at Carleton University in the School of Journalism and Communication. Their creative practice and research focus are policy, activism, governance, and surveillance trends in Canada and North America. Within their research, they explore creative research as methodology, and the ways that events and objects produce knowledge and activate their audience. Stéfy’s creative work takes several forms, such as installation, performance, site-specific, online and technological curatorial projects, new media and experimental photography. In 2018, their work Hunting for Prey received an honorable mention for the inaugural Surveillance and Society Art Fund Prize.

Julia Chan is a mixed-race settler, writer, artist, and academic living in Tkaronto/Toronto. Recently, she was a Mitacs Postdoctoral Visitor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University, the Managing Editor of PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas, and the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University’s Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University at Kingston. Her doctoral research explored the connections between image-based sexual abuse, racialized gender, surveillance, and cinematic/visual cultures. Her academic work has appeared in Porn Studies and is forthcoming in the edited collection Screening #MeToo: Rape Culture in Hollywood (SUNY Press). Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, subTerrain, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others and has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council. Her photography and video work have been exhibited at the Tett Centre and Queen’s University.

[1] Bell, David. “Surveillance is Sexy.” Surveillance & Society, vol. 6, no. 3, 2009, pp. 203-212. Koskela, Hille. “Webcams, TV Shows, and Mobile Phones: Empowering Exhibitionism.” Surveillance & Society, vol. 2, no. 2/3, 2004, pp. 199-215.
McGrath, John. Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space. Routledge, 2004.

[2] Jones, Angela. Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry. NYU Press, 2020.page3image45912768

[3] Finn, Jonathan. “Seeing Surveillantly: Surveillance as Social Practice.” Eyes Everywhere, edited by Aaron Doyle, Randy Lippert and David Lyon. Routledge, 2011.
Lyon, David. The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Polity, 2018.
McGrath, John. Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space. Routledge, 2004.
McKnight, Stéphanie. “Creative Research Methodologies for Surveillance Studies”, Surveillance & Society, 2020, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 148-56.
Slack, Jennifer and J. Magregor Wise. Culture and Technology: A Primer. Peter Lang, 2014.

[4] Monahan, Torin and David Murakami Wood. “Introduction: Surveillance Studies as a Transdisciplinary Endeavor.” Surveillance Studies: A Reader, edited by Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood. Oxford University Press, 2018.

[5] brown, adrienne m. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. AK Press, 2019. Frischherz, Michaela. “Finding Pleasure in the Pandemic: Or, Confronting COVID-19 Anxiety through Queer Feminist Pleasure Politics.” QED (East Lansing, Mich.), vol. 7, no. 3, 2020, pp. 179–84.
Harris, Laura Alexandra. “Queer Black Feminism: The Pleasure Principle.” Feminist Review, 1996, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 3-30.
Taormino, Tristan et al. “The Politics of Producing Pleasure.” The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taorimino et al. Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013, pp. 9-20.
Vasiliou, Elena. “Penitentiary Pleasures: Queer Understandings of Prison Paradoxes.” Criminology & Criminal Justice, 2020, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 577-89.

[6] brown, adrienne m. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. AK Press, 2019.

[7] Chan, Julia. “Violence or Pleasure? Surveillance and the (Non-)Consensual Upskirt.” Porn Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, July 2018, pp. 351–55.
Koskela, Hille. “Video Surveillance, Gender, and the Safety of Public Urban Space: ‘Peeping Tom’ Goes High Tech?” Urban Geography, vol. 23, no. 3, 2002, pp. 257–78.

 

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