https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/announcement/view/98
On behalf of the RIAS Editorial Board, we invite contributions to the following issue of the Review of International American Studies:
Next issue: Gender and Surveillance—RIAS Vol. 15, Spring–Summer (1/2022)
Guest-edited by Molly Geidel and J.D. Schnepf
From the carceral gaze scripted by Hollywood blockbusters to the normative body anticipated by the TSA’s airport security body scanners, from the US drone program’s gendered definition of “enemy combatant,” to legal regimes that alternately ban and mandate face coverings, the gendered histories of surveillance inform the way we know the world and come to be known in turn. Across areas including immigration, medicine, consumer behavior, and national security, as well as digital, literary, popular, and visual culture, gender emerges as a key site through which techniques of surveillance continue to be vigorously enacted and contested.
This issue will build on foundational work at the intersection of gender studies and surveillance studies done by Toby Beauchamp, Simone Browne, Caren Kaplan, and contributors to the 2015 edited collection, Feminist Surveillance Studies. In their introduction to the collection, editors Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshanna Amielle Magnet express their hope that the book’s focus on surveillance concerns as critical feminist concerns “serves as a jumping-off point for future scholarship” (3). With this issue, we seek to take up their desire to carry on this work by considering how histories, cultures, and technologies of surveillance engage with matters of gender alongside race, sexuality, class, and able-and disabled-bodiedness. We are interested in a broad definition of surveillance studies that encompasses a range of feminist approaches to epistemological regimes and gendered ways of seeing. More generally, we seek work that thinks in new ways about both historical and contemporary monitoring, scrutinizing, collecting, and observing in the hopes that it will help us better understand the complexity and creativity of gendered surveillance and its resistance.
To this end, we invite essays that address the visibility and opacity, domination and subjection, central to gender studies and surveillance studies on prospective topics including but not limited to the following:
- Practices of surveillance as maintenance of the US-Mexico border
- Surveillance technologies and gendered labor in domestic space
- Racialized masculinity and U.S. national security
- The novel and gendered subjects of surveillance
- Poetic form and the language of surveillance
- Artistic/creative responses to eluding and undermining the surveillance state
- Transgender identity and surveillance practices (at airport security checkpoints, border crossings, public spaces, etc.)
- “Security Moms” and “Security Feminists”
- Depictions of girlhood, womanhood, or motherhood routed through surveillance and its encroachment on feminine privacy
- The state surveillance of black activists and authors
- The gendering and racialization of privacy
- Artificial intelligence and narratives of unmanning
- Self-surveillance and racialized femininity found in health, beauty, and ‘body confidence’ discourse
Instructions for Submission:
Articles, including all required metadata, can be submitted to the OJS system by October 1, 2021 in accordance with guidelines available in the “About” and “Submission” sections of the journal: https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/about/submissions