ABSTRACT
Surveillance has increasingly been part of the everyday experience of people throughout the world, whether it is through heightened security practices that have emerged through anxiety about the spread of global terrorism or the ever-increasing presence of commercial surveillance technologies, both licit and illicit. The significance of surveillance resonates with the history and politics of queer people, queer theory and queer methodologies, since surveillance is part of a system of power that, among other things, shapes subjectivity, as Michel Foucault (1979) has argued, and normalises, as Michael Warner (2000) has argued. Surveillance has been engaged, for instance, to monitor people with HIV and AIDS, to police the spaces in which dissident sexual behaviour occurs, and to expose the non-normative private sexual practices of those who have fought publicly against gay marriage. Surveillance also intersects with visibility/exposure, simultaneously a goal of the minority-rights activism that has included queer sexualities as well as a fear of many who find themselves outside of the sexual mainstream. Brought together, each discipline has much to offer the other. The emerging discipline of surveillance studies has examined the relationship between theories (of, for example, vision, policing and subjectivity) and actual surveillance practices. Queer studies (or applied queer theory) has similarly investigated the relationship between theory and practice; queer geography, for instance, provides surveillance studies with a nuanced sense of the significance of the body and the subject in space (Duncan 1996; Bell and Valentine 1995; Boone et al. 2000). And queer theory itself offers challenging ways to reimagine the binary relationships – subject/object, private/public, visible/invisible, exposed/hidden – on which surveillance depends (Sedgwick 1990; 2003; Warner 2000; 2002). The conjunction of queer studies and surveillance studies has the potential to 330illuminate the relationship between the state and private forces that shape space, behaviour, subjectivity, consumerism and citizenship.
