Confronting and Subverting LGBTQIA+ Surveillance

Summary

Scholarship on the surveillance of LGBTQIA+ communities looks at how technologies of social control and classification deployed by the state are normalized in culture to monitor, regulate, and marginalize gender and sexual minorities. These areas of study are primarily informed by critical surveillance studies, queer theory, and Michel Foucault’s theories of discourse, power/knowledge, disciplinary power, and biopolitics . Commitments to intersectional approaches centering race, ethnicity, class, and national identity alongside gender and sexuality in this scholarship show how surveillance technologies affix privilege and marginalization to different racialized identity formations across time and place. This transdisciplinary scholarship from anthropology, big data studies, Black studies, communication, cultural studies, digital and new media studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, legal studies, media studies, public health, sexuality studies, sociology, surveillance studies, and trans studies looks at how the surveillance of LGBTQIA+ communities occurs across legal, medical, corporate, social, and cultural contexts and how they resist these technologies of social control and classification. Opacity has been a key concept for theorizing modes of resistance to surveillance. This scholarship looks at the performance of opacity by LGBTQIA+ communities as a spectrum of visibility and participation from retreating, rupturing, and retorting surveillance systems to preserve individual safety, community identity, and possibilities for new futures.