Gendering Surveillance Theory: Lessons from the eGirls Project

Gendering Surveillance Theory:

Lessons from the eGirls ProjectValerie Steeves

Jane BaileySurveillance & Society

Conference25 April 2014

Laura Mulvey

radical

Hollywood

objectified

women

to be looked at

subjectivizing men

male gaze

Michele White

online social media

disruptive

“to-be-looked-atness”

alternatives to discriminatory

stereotypesSenft

Dixon-Scott

transgress socially-imposed modesty norms

Koskela

feministcritical racequeer theory

in/visibilityobjectification

otherized identities

watchedintelligible

doing surveillance studies

gendersexual identityintersections

raceAboriginality

watched

heightened state and institutional monitoring

path-breaking

panoptic

empowered few

objectified many

Brighenti

spectrum of visibility

multi-directional

seebe seen

interpersonalgovernmental/institutional

bedroom culture

self representation

producers

panoptic

synoptic

interpersonal watching

surveillance studies

power relations

individual rights and liberties

otherized

non-institutional

discriminatory myths & attitudes

de-liberating

gendering of surveillance studies

“artificially abstract bodies, identities, and

interactions from social contexts in ways that both

obscure and aggravate gender and other social

inequalities”Monahan, 2009, 287

super visible

normalized

panopticsynoptic

interpersonal watching

surveillant forces

rupture

Mulvey

body

replicated & amplified

commercial surveillance

family member and peer surveillance

visual nature

bedroom culture

permeated

online performances

interaction of panoptic and synoptic gazes

mainstream stereotypes

commercial

panoptic and synoptic merge

razor thin

the slut line

“more girls everywhere trying to be like the

prettiest girls on magazines and stuff”

“It’ll make you feel like crap. It’s like, just again

setting in, why can’t I look like that? Why can’t I be like that? Why don’t I

have these friends? Why am I not popular? [It] just

drains everybody”

“You’re like, oh man, I don’t look like that, um, but I could some day you know, but you just, you just don’t right now. So you might get down on

yourself because of that”

“change my body”

“I think social media is great at giving girls this

fantasy world. But at the same time, I think it’s also really easy to sort of make themselves feel really bad

about themselves”

“I used to think, oh cool, I got 10 likes, and then you

look at girls who look revealing and they have

50 [from guys]. And you’re like, oh, I wonder

why…”

“confidence”

“They’re going to get feedback like, ‘Wow,

you’re hot’. Definitely from guys. ‘Wow,you’re

sexy!’ ‘Damn, what I would do if I as here,’ and, like, all that kind of stuff”

“And from girls, you’re going to get, um … from

their best friends, probably, ‘Oh my God, you

look gorgeous! You look so skinny!’”

“And you’re going to get, from girls that don’t like her, ‘Wow, you’re a slut!’,

you know, like, ‘You’re nothing but a whore!’, like, ‘Put some clothes

on!’”

“A girl, let’s say she’s, I don’t know, with a bunch of guys in a sexual pose, or … has tons of booze

around her, or something”

“Someone will write a comment that will be, like, kind of subtle but showing

that it’s inappropriate”

“And a lot of people will join in, and you can get, like, up to 75 comments and everyone’s joining in

and fighting”

“Guys can get away with murder”

“You’re fat. You make me look good.”

vsteeves@uottawa.cajbailey@uottawa.ca