E-Book Overview
Since the 1960s, and increasingly since September 11, 2001, “surveillance studies” has become a rapidly expanding field, devised to examine the ways in which information about people’s personal lives is obtained, stored, and shared and how these details are used to influence and manage populations. This special issue of Social Text takes on surveillance in its domestic and international forms, exploring the impact that it has on labor, technology, and privacy.One article looks at the emergence of the biometrics industries and its effect on surveillance systems and businesses. Another addresses the labor of surveillance and how surveillance work and policy affect the homeland security workforce. Various geographic areas are highlighted in several essays, including those on sex workers in Bengal, local surveillance in Turkey, and welfare surveillance and resistance in Appalachian Ohio. Additional themes include historical modes of surveillance, processes of legitimation for intensifying surveillance, and cultural representations of surveillance. Contributors. Kelly A. Gates, Swati Ghosh, John Gilliom, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Richard Maxwell, Laikwan Pang, David J. Phillips, Michael J. Shapiro, ?agatay Topal
E-Book Content
Contents
Surveillance Dossier Editor Richard Maxwell Surveillance: Work, Myth, and Policy
Richard Maxwell 1
Every Move You Make: Bodies, Surveillance, and Media Michael J. Shapiro 21 Biometrics and Post-9/11 Technostalgia
Kelly A. Gates 35
Surveillance in Decolonized Social Space: The Case of Sex Workers in Bengal Swati Ghosh 55 Resisting Surveillance
John Gilliom 71
Global Citizens and Local Powers: Surveillance in Turkey Çag˘atay Topal 85 From Privacy to Visibility: Context, Identity, and Power in Ubiquitous Computing Environments David J. Phillips 95
Suppressing Grief: The Politics of “McCarthy”-Era Testimonies Margaret Morganroth Gullette 109 Copying Kill Bill
Laikwan Pang 133
Contributors
Rebecca Baron is a Los Angeles–based fi lmmaker and faculty member at CalArts School of Film/Video. Her experimental and documentary fi lms have been screened extensively in the United States and internationally at the Whitney Biennial, New York Film Festival, Cinémathèque Française, Oberhausen, Viennale, and in Rotterdam. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship. More information about the Mass Observation movement can be found in her article in the fall 2004 issue of Cabinet. Kelly A. Gates is professor of media studies at Queens College of the City University of New York. She is the author of “Wanted Dead or Digitized: Facial Recognition Technology and Privacy,” in Television and New Media (Sage); “Authorship and Identity in the Genome Age,” in Information, Theory, and Society (James Nicholas); and “Technologies of Identity and the Identity of Technology: Race and the Social Construction of Biometrics,” in Race Identity and Representation in Education, vol. 2, ed. Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy (Routledge). Swati Ghosh is a lecturer in economics at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata. She publishes occasionally in Economic and Political Weekly and is a member of the editorial collective of from the margins, a journal of concerned writings on gender, coloniality, and postcoloniality. John Gilliom is a professor in political science at Ohio University. He is the author of Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (University of Chicago Press) and Surveillance, Privacy, and the Law: Employee Drug Testing and the Politics of Social Control (University of Michigan Press). Margaret Morganroth Gullette is the author of Aged by Culture (University of Chicago Press) and the prizewinning Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (University Press o