Public:Session 4

Session 4: Surveillance technologies

Topic outline & prep infos

• Fri, 24 May 2019, 11:00–16:00
• HS1

In this session, we will discuss how surveillance technologies in the broadest sense – that is, technologies that can be and are commonly used for, e.g., tracking and examining people, particularly in security-related contexts – are linked to gendered/-ing and racialised/-ing regimes of power.

Required preparation

• read: Currah, P., & Mulqueen, T. (2011). Securitizing gender: Identity, biometrics, and transgender bodies at the airport. social research, 78(2), 557-582.
• watch: MTF Transition: Flying While Trans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jVt6mML1uo
• watch: Flying while trans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lT-n2UjeX0
• think about how surveillance may have impacted your behaviours/identities/desires in specific places and at specific times

Guiding questions for the required preparation:

• How does the experience of trans people at airports show the links between gender and racial discrimination?
• What does a move from negative identification (identifying who someone is not) to positive identification (identifying who someone is) mean? What problems do document-based and biometrical means of identification entail?
• How are the construction of risks/threats and the normalisation of individuals/populations connected?
• Do you find a conceptualisation of gender as an event, taking place in the context of a specific assemblage, useful? What about other aspects of the world, such as race, class, dis-/ability, …?
• What other places of gender (or other identity-related) “veridiction” (p. 563) can you think of?

Suggestions for peer teaching

• DNA profiling (suggested materials partially in German)
  • How are people and crimes produced and linked to each other through DNA profiling?
  • Kruse, C. (2010). Forensic evidence: Materializing bodies, materializing crimes. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 17(4), 363–377.
  • Ladewig, V. (2010). Gendered DNA: Zur Entstehung einer Person. In: Degele, N., Schmitz, S., Mangelsdorf, M.,Gramespacher, E. (Eds.): Gendered Bodies in Motion, pp. 115–126. Opladen: Budrich Uni Press.
  • Schüle, C. (2008). Die Unsichtbare. Zeit. Available at http://www.zeit.de/2008/18/Die-Unsichtbare.
• Race and surveillance
  • How are racial and technological regimes interlinked? How does race ‘get done’ through technoscientific means?
  • Browne, S. (2012). Race and surveillance. In: Handbook on Surveillance Studies, pp. 72–79. New York: Routledge.
  • M’charek, A., Schramm, K., & Skinner, D. (2014). Topologies of race: Doing territory, population and identity in Europe. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 39(4), 468–487.
  • wzamen01. (2009). HP computers are racist. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM.