[Air-L] CFP: Queer Surveillance -- Deadline Dec. 1

[Gary Kafer]

Dear all,

We invite you to consider the following CFP for a Special Issue of
*Surveillance
& Society* on "Queer Surveillance"
Editors: Daniel Grinberg & Gary Kafer

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/announcement/view/249

Submission deadline:* December 1, 2018* for publication September 2019.

This special issue calls for an encounter between queer studies and
surveillance studies to reconsider the stakes of queerness in relation to
vectors of monitoring, control, and intimacy. Our conception of queer
surveillance aims to expand upon the ways in which assemblages of affects,
behaviors, and bodies are made either legible or non-normative within
dominant social systems on local, national, and transnational scales. By
interrogating the conjunctures of queerness and surveillance, this issue
seeks to deepen understanding of the classificatory processes that register
some bodies as overly opaque and dangerous and others as sufficiently
transparent and secure. At the same time, we ask how queerness and
surveillance can be co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing in order to
more fully recognize where their shifting logics conflict or align within
nationalist and colonial paradigms.

Our conception of queer in queer surveillance is neither identitarian (the
surveillance of stable LGBTQ+ identities) nor anti-identitarian (queerness
as resistant to the identities that surveillance systems construct).
Rather, this issue seeks to explore the queer relationships that we might
develop with the rubrics that surveillance technologies impose upon bodies
through categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, religion,
and citizenship. What is queer here is not simply the matrix of identities
falling under the rubric of LGBTQ+. Advancing from previous scholarship on
queer surveillance, we consider the ways in which queerness gestures
towards the spatial and temporal contingency of identity formations that
hegemonic structures of visibility, acceptability, and legality continually
make and unmake.1 We take note from Jasbir Puar’s assertion that the
“assemblage” of queerness isn’t simply the opposition between queer and
non-queer subjects or a praxis of resistant alterity, but is produced
through the enmeshing of bodies, affects, and technologies across the
normative territories that social categorizations shape.2

Building on recent work on feminism and race in surveillance studies, this
issue will also move beyond narrow questions of privacy and fixed
identities into more capacious concepts of privilege, risk, and access.3
Key here is the conceit that surveillance is yoked to structural
inequalities and systems of oppression wherein biased surveillance systems
marginalize and dehumanize communities. As such, we might say that
surveillance systems do not operate through predetermined identities, but
rather politicize their production, distribution, and performance.
Consider, for example, more recent scholarship that demonstrates how
racial, gender, and class politics impact trans communities’ abilities to
traverse security checkpoints, obtain access to medical care, or navigate
bureaucratic challenges of identification.4 Gender here becomes a
politicized site of negotiation normalized through its citational effects
on bodies within affective economies of fear, suspicion, and risk.

For this special issue, we invite scholarship that attends to the
corporeal, technological, and affective impacts of queer surveillance in
both its historical and contemporary iterations. Likewise, we are
interested in mapping local and global scales of such operations.
Specifically, we ask how queerness is historically and culturally
contingent and how the standards of the normative and perverse vary across
legal and sociopolitical contexts. Concurrently, we ask how queerness can
reorient the concentrations of surveillance, as well as the affinities and
attunements that emerge from such counteractive positions. In addition,
this issue will outline the ever-shifting contours of queer surveillance as
it is being enacted and as it radically reshapes the configurations of
visibility, desirability, and identification.

Possible research areas within queer surveillance studies might include
(but are not limited to):

● Queering surveillance theory
● Histories and archives of queer surveillance
● Global practices of monitoring sexual identity, gender, and race
● Counter-surveillance and sousveillance tactics
● Policing of intimacy and sexual practices
● Healthcare in queer communities
● Identity formation in self-surveillance and peer surveillance
● Queer dynamics of digital surveillance (algorithms, networking apps,
social media)
● The politics of visibility/invisibility and opacity/transparency
● Biopolitics, corporealities, and affect
● Normativity and abnormality
● Queerness and the carceral state

Submission Information:

We welcome full academic papers, opinion pieces, review pieces, poetry,
artistic, and audiovisual submissions. 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 December 1, 2018, for publication in September 2019. (When submitting,
please indicate in the notes box that the paper is for the special issue on
Queer Surveillance.)

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

For all inquiries regarding the issue, please contact the editors: Gary
Kafer <gkafer at uchicago.edu> and Daniel Grinberg <dgrinberg at umail.ucsb.edu>.

References:
1 See David Phillips, “Negotiating the Digital Closet: Online Pseudonyms
and the Politics of Sexual Identity,” Information, Communication, and
Society 5.3 (2002): 406-424; David Phillips and Carol Cunningham, “Queering
Surveillance Research” in Queer Online: Media Technology and Sexuality, ed.
Kate O’Riordan and David J. Phillips (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 31-44;
Kathryn Conrad, “‘Nothing to Hide… Nothing to Fear’: Discriminatory
Surveillance and Queer Visibility in Great Britain and Northern Ireland” in
The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, eds. Noreen Giffney and
Michael O’Rourke (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 329-346.

2 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007).

3 Rachel Dubrofsky and Shoshana Magnet, eds. Feminist Surveillance Studies
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015); Emily van der Meulen
and Robert Heynen, eds. Expanding the Gaze: Gender and the Politics of
Surveillance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). Simone Browne,
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 2015).

4 Shoshana Magnet and Tara Rodgers, “Stripping for the State: Whole Body
Imaging Technologies and the Surveillance of Othered Bodies,” Feminist
Media Studies 12.1 (2012): 101-118; Toby Beauchamp, “Artful Concealment and
Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and U.S. State Surveillance After
9/11,” Surveillance & Society 6.4 (2009): 356-366; Lisa Jean Moore and
Paisley Currah, “Legally Sexed: Birth Certificates and Transgender
Citizens” in Feminist Surveillance Studies, edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky
and Shoshanna A. Magnet (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press,
2015), 58-76.

-- 
Gary Kafer
Department of Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago
gkafer at uchicago.edu