Performing diabetes: Felt surveillance and discreet self-management

Abstract

Sustaining the diabetic body involves visible practices of expert self-management: injecting insulin and testing blood sugar levels. Drawing from qualitative interviews and online questionnaires, collected for a project on ‘the everyday geographies of living with diabetes’, in this paper, I consider how people with type 1 diabetes manage the visibility of these practices. I contend that they experience a felt surveillance, meaning a heightened awareness of being seen. Using Foucault’s concept of panopticism as a starting point I propose the concept of felt surveillance as a way of understanding diabetes norms and the performance of selfmanagement in public space. Critiques of panopticism offer an insight into how people with diabetes manage their bodies in ways that resist and rework the panoptic gaze. Nonetheless I argue that felt surveillance involves elements of a disciplining gaze that creates norms of diabetic behaviour. While co-opting this gaze is possible, there remains internalised self-disciplinary norms for life with diabetes. Using life with diabetes as an example, felt surveillance extends the panoptic model, as many scholars now advocate, and offers a more nuanced understanding of how people with diabetes experience the condition.