Routing

Abstract

As Simone Browne has observed, performances of racializing surveillance “reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines.” Taking cues from thinkers such as Browne and Donna Haraway, this special issue draws on feminist understandings of sight as a partial, situated, and embodied type of sense-making laden with ableist assumptions to explore how racial politics have structured practices of oversight. How have technologies of race and vision worked together to monitor modes of being-in-the-world? In what ways have bodies performed for and against such governance? With these initial questions, we set out to stage a methodologically feminist forum at the intersection of critical race theory and surveillance studies. The contributions that animate this special issue propose and problematize numerous responses to racializing surveillance and the myriad vectors of violence tied to it. Through this collective inquiry, the articles, creative essays, multi-media works, and reviews here pursue an array of possibilities for redirecting powers of scrutiny—particularly those mobilized for oppressive purposes—to strengthen social infrastructures of care.