CFP: Gender, Public Space and Surveillance

From the FLP mailbox, this CFP:

CALL FOR PAPERS
Expanding the Gaze: Gender, Public Space, and Surveillance
Deadline: September 15, 2012

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of scholarship covering the broad area of surveillance studies. Surveillance, or the ability to engage in what David Lyon (2003) calls ‘social sorting’, is understood by social scientists to be key to neoliberal governance, in large part because of its capacity to reconfigure both public space and forms of citizenship.  And yet, to date, very little scholarly work systematically considers the gendered dimensions of, and experiences with, surveillance. The little research that does exist indicates the need for more in-depth study. This edited collection seeks to engage  with contemporary studies on surveillance by expanding the gaze to include a critical analysis of gender and public space.

The aim of the collection is to capture a wide range of gendered experiences, identities, and subjectivities, including, but not limited to, those of ‘women’. By public space we are referring to those places to which the public has reasonable expectations of access.  This space might be privately owned, public space, or a hybrid; it may be physical (e.g. shopping malls, city streets) or virtual (e.g. public on-line profiles and social media platforms). Surveillance itself may be technological (e.g. CCTV) or informal (e.g. ‘eyes on the street’). The key uniting theme of ‘Expanding the Gaze: Gender, Public Space, and Surveillance’ is the ways that the dimensions of gender, public space, and surveillance interact to produce particular configurations that have yet to be fully explored.

This call for papers seeks innovative feminist and/or intersectional scholarship for an interdisciplinary edited collection of original works. We welcome submissions from a variety of perspectives and academic disciplines, including: communication studies, criminology, geography, law, sexuality studies, socio-legal studies, sociology, and/or women’s and gender studies.  Papers may be theoretical or empirical in nature.

Topics may include (but are not limited to)

– Surveillance, bodies, and forms of citizenship
– Sexuality/ies and surveillance
– Masculinity/ies and surveillance
– Gendered resistance to surveillance
– Gender and urban CCTV
– Surveillance and the intersectionality of gender, race, and class
– Queer and trans perspectives on, and experiences with, surveillance
technologies
– Media/cinematic representations of surveillance
– Relationships between the watchers and being watched

Abstract submission:

Interested contributors should send a 300-500 word abstract and 200 word
bio to genderedlens@gmail.com no later than September 15, 2012.

Those invited to contribute to the collection will be notified in October
2012 and full papers will be due in April 2013.

Please direct questions to collection editor:

Emily van der Meulen,
evandermeulen@ryerson.ca
Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

-Bridget Crawford