Vermeer’s curtain: Privacy, slut-shaming and surveillance in ‘A girl reading a letter’

Abstract

This essay brings a Dutch old master and a subreddit into provocative apposition to argue that ‘Creep forum’-type slut-shaming does not represent a new cultural formation. Moreover, by using art history to attune ourselves to slut-shaming’s historical emergence, we gain new insights into the present-day dynamics of this mode of inspection and regulation. Presenting a historicised analysis of Vermeer’s painting, ‘A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window’, alongside a contextualised approach to the construction of ‘sluts’, this article recalibrates our understanding both of the importance of shame within the surveillance canon and specific modalities of female experience of asymmetrical inspection. Finally, responding to recent calls by Hille Koskela, Kirstie Ball and others for a more explicitly gendered approach to surveillance, I offer a hybrid methodology that brings together (slut-)shame and surveillance discourse in relation to paradigms of discipline.