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Feminist Surveillance Studies
By Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Shoshana Amielle Magnet Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7546-3
CHAPTER 1
NOT-SEEING
State Surveillance, Settler Colonialism, and Gender Violence
ANDREA SMITH
He [Father Olbés] sent for the husband and he asked him why his wife hadn't borne children. The Indian pointed to the sky ... to signify that only God knew the cause ... asked through the interpreter if he slept with his wife, to which the Indian said yes. Then the father had them placed in a room together so that they would perform coitus in his presence. The Indian refused, but they forced him to show him his penis in order to affirm that he had it in good order. The father next brought the wife and had ... her enter another room in order to examine her reproductive parts.
— David E. Stannard, American Holocaust
The focus of surveillance studies has generally been on the modern, bureaucratic state. And yet, as David Stannard's (1992) account of the sexual surveillance of indigenous peoples within the Spanish mission system in the Americas demonstrates, the history of patriarchal and colonialist surveillance in this continent is much longer. The traditional account of surveillance studies tends to occlude the manner in which the settler state is foundationally built on surveillance. Because surveillance studies focuses on the modern, bureaucratic state, it has failed to account for the gendered colonial history of surveillance. Consequently, the strategies for addressing surveillance do not question the state itself, but rather seek to modify the extent to which and the manner in which the state surveils. As Mark Rifkin (2011) and Scott Morgensen (2011) additionally demonstrate, the sexual surveillance of native peoples was a key strategy by which native peoples were rendered manageable populations within the colonial state. One would think that an anticolonial feminist analysis would be central to the field of surveillance studies. Yet, ironically, it is this focus on the modern state that often obfuscates the settler colonialist underpinning of technologies of surveillance. I explore how a feminist surveillance-studies focus on gendered colonial violence reshapes the field by bringing into view that which cannot be seen: the surveillance strategies that have effected indigenous disappearance in order to establish the settler state itself. In particular, a focus on gendered settler colonialism foregrounds how surveillance is not simply about "seeing" but about "not-seeing" the settler state.
Surveillance and the Biopolitical Modern State
David Lyon (2007) defines surveillance as follows.
For the sake of argument, we may start by saying that it is the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction. Surveillance directs its attention in the end to individuals (even though aggregate data, such as those available in the public domain, may be used to build up a background picture). It is focused. By systematic, I mean that this attention to personal details is not random, occasional or spontaneous; it is deliberate and depends on certain protocols and techniques. Beyond this, surveillance is routine; it occurs as a "normal" part of everyday life in all societies. (14)
The field of surveillance studies is important, Lyon argues, because of the "rapidly increasing influence of surveillance in our daily lives and in the operation of very large-scale operations" (ibid., 9). The growth in surveillance is often tied to Foucauldian notions of the rise of the disciplinary society and the ascendancy of biopolitics in which peoples become populations to be counted, measured, and regulated in order to promote the life of the normalizing state. Because certain populations are deemed threats to the normalizing state, they must be constantly monitored, and thus are subject to what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) defines as "premature death" in order to preserve the body of the whole. And yet Foucault notes that, ironically, these biopolitical moves were first practiced on the bourgeoisie themselves. Through the disciplining of the bourgeois body, the "normal" body is defined as the measure by which all other bodies are marked as "deviant" (Foucault 1980, 123). Logics of normalization must have some pretense to universality even as these normalizing strategies are not evenly applied. Thus, it is no surprise that these disciplinary techniques come to be used broadly, not just on those populations deemed to be threats.
The Temporality of Settler Colonial Biopolitics
As noted by many critical-race- and ethnic-studies scholars, the manner in which Foucauldian analyses of the state tend to temporally situate biopower during the era of the modern state disappears the biopolitics of settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery. Alexander Weheliye (2014) points out that Foucault's conception of a complicated biopower is juxtaposed against a simpler "ordinary racism" (Foucault 1997, 128). As Foucault asserts, "I am certainly not saying that racism was invented at this time. It had already been in existence for a very long time. But I think it functioned elsewhere" (ibid., 254). Relegated to both a theoretical and geotemporal "elsewhere," Foucault then provides no elaboration on the nature of this "other" racism." As Weheliye (2014) argues, when biopower is rendered as the real racism, whose apex can be found in Nazi Germany, indigenous genocide, slavery, and colonialism disappear into given forms of simple racism that require no account of their logics. Similarly, Achille Mbembe argues that the mechanics of Nazi Germany are not fundamentally different from the "necropolitics" of the colony or the plantation in which "'peace' is more likely to take on the face of a 'war without end'" (2003, 23). Denise Ferreira da Silva's germinal text, Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), also demonstrates that these forms of racism precede the modern state as Western epistemology is itself fundamentally a racial project. A focus on biopolitical racism as it is tied to the modern state thus often occludes analysis of the racial logics of settler colonialism and plantation slavery.
Surveillance studies's focus on the modern state similarly hides an analysis of the settler colonialist and white supremacist logics of surveillance that precede the ascendancy of the modern state. Furthermore, attention to these colonial and white supremacist logics of surveillance require a feminist analysis, since colonialism and white supremacy are structured by heteropatriarchy. For instance, Mark Rifkin's When Did Indians Become Straight? and Scott Morgensen's Spaces Between Us call attention to the heteropatriarchal nature of colonial bio/necropolitics. That is, the shift from categorizing native peoples within the U.S. polity according to their membership in distinct nations to lumping them together under the racial category of "Indian" is often understood as a colonial tactic. But what Rifkin and Morgensen demonstrate is that this categorization is dependent on heteronormativity. Since they pose a threat to the colonial order, native nations are broken up into heteronormative individual family units in order to facilitate their absorption into the colonial state. This absorption occurs through a colonialist surveillance strategy by which the sexual and gender identities of native peoples must be constantly marked and policed. Through this surveillance, native peoples become racialized "Indians" who are managed through the politics of biopower (Rifkin 2011). Of course, as racialized subjects, native nations still constitute a threat to the well-being of the colonial state and hence are never properly heteronormative. The United States continues to be obsessed with solving the "Indian problem," whether through boarding schools or land allotments. But Indianization, as it were, allows colonialism to become a population problem rather than a political problem (ibid.). Native nations are seen as sufficiently domesticated to be administered through government policy, rather than seen as a continuing political threat requiring ongoing military intervention.
In addition, as Driskill, Finley, Gilley, and Morgensen (2011) argue, native peoples are fundamentally "queered" under settler colonialism such that conquest is justified by their sexual perversity. Deemed "sodomites," native peoples' presumed sexual perversity justifies their genocide. Indigenous colonization is then achieved through sexual regulation, such as sexual acts of terror (the mass rapes of native peoples in massacres), as well as policies of normalization in which heteropatriarchy is instilled in native communities through allotment, boarding schools, and criminalization, among other contemporary forms of the surveillance and regulation of native peoples. As I have argued elsewhere, sexual violence was a primary colonial strategy by which native peoples were rendered inherently rapeable, and by extension their lands inherently invadeable, and their resources inherently extractable (A. Smith 2005a). Thus, contrary to Lyon's assertion that "the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction" preceded the rise of the bureaucratic state, these strategies were foundational to the settler state that required the gendered reclassification of the people from various indigenous nations into "Indians."
As Patrick Wolfe (1999) notes, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event; that is, settler colonialism requires the continual disappearance of the indigenous peoples on whose land the settler state is situated (2). Consequently, these colonial heteropatriarchal logics continue. As Jacqui Alexander's critique of the heteropatriarchal postcolonial state demonstrates, on one hand, the postcolonial state (or states that strive to be postcolonial) is imagined to be incapable of self-governance through its previously described presumed sexual perversity. It thus seeks to prove its ability to self-govern by continuing the colonial policing of supposed sexually perverse "nonprocreative noncitizens" within its borders to legitimate its claims to govern. In policing the gender and sexual boundaries of the nation-state by purifying it of imagined racialized and gendered contaminants, Alexander (2005) argues, the postcolonial state succeeds in obfuscating the permeability of its boundaries to multinational capital. This policing, structured under the logics of what Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2003) terms "aggrieved masculinity," then serves to allay the anxiety of the postcolonial state and postcolonial aspirants in the wake of the postcolonial state's feminization within the heteropatriarchal logics of global capital. While Lyon's analysis points us to the surveillance strategies of the state, an anticolonial feminist analysis demonstrates that the problem is instead the state itself as surveillance strategy. Consequently, it is no surprise that states that have "decolonized" perpetuate the same surveillance strategies, because surveillance is structured into the logic of the state itself. That is, if we relocate the focus of surveillance studies from the bureaucratic state to the settler colonial, white supremacist, and heteropatriarchal state, we may then reformulate our analysis of surveillance.
In particular, I would like to foreground the focus of the field of surveillance studies on "seeing." According to Lyon, "Surveillance studies is about seeing things and, more particularly, about seeing people" (2007, 1). The "watchful gaze," as Lyon labels it, is what gives surveillance its "quintessential characteristic" (2007, 1). A focus on gendered settler colonialism would instead foreground how surveillance is about a simultaneous seeing and not-seeing. That is, the purposeful gaze of the state on some things and peoples serves the purpose of simultaneously making some hypervisible through surveillance while making others invisible. The colonial gaze that surveils native communities to monitor, measure, and account for their "dysfunctional" behaviors conceals from view the settler colonial state that creates these conditions in the first place. A feminist surveillance studies focus on gendered colonial violence highlights that which cannot be seen — indigenous disappearance.
The Settler Surveillance Strategies of Not-Seeing
Settler colonialism fundamentally relies on a logic of not-seeing. In particular, on a not-seeing of the indigenous people's lands in order to allow their colonial takeover. Terra nullius, the legal justification used for the expropriation of indigenous land in Australia and elsewhere — or to use the Zionist justification for Palestinian expulsion, "a land without a people for a people without a land" — is premised on the not-seeing of peoples already there. Within the United States, this expropriation relied on the "doctrine of discovery." As outlined in the case Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), "Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and this overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives." "Discovery" necessarily rests on the absence of native peoples, who would otherwise be the actual "discoverers" of their lands. And, as Robert Williams (2005) notes, U.S. jurisprudence has never renounced the doctrine of discovery on which Indian case law is based. Consequently, the colonial project is a somewhat precarious project of disappearing the peoples that it cannot see — a genocide that must disavow itself. As Sarita See argues, "If the history of the American empire is defined by forgetting, its aesthetic is structured by double disavowal. According to the New World aesthetic, it seems possible to erase the erasure of the past" (2009, 66). Thus, the strategies of surveillance are always simultaneously not just about what can be seen, but about disappearing from view that which delegitimizes the state itself. What must not be seen is not only the peoples themselves, but the forms of governance and ways of life that they represent.
Gender violence is a central strategy of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Colonizers did not just kill off indigenous peoples in this land: native massacres were always accompanied by sexual mutilation and rape. The goal of colonialism is not just to kill colonized peoples, but to destroy their sense of being people (A. Smith 2005a). The generally nonpatriarchal and nonhierarchical nature of many native communities posed a threat to European patriarchal societies. Consequently, when colonists first came to this land, they saw the necessity of instilling patriarchy in native communities, for they realized that indigenous peoples would not accept colonial domination if their own indigenous societies were not structured on the basis of social hierarchies. Patriarchy rests on a gender-binary system; hence, it is no coincidence that colonizers also targeted indigenous peoples who did not fit within this binary model. Gender violence thus inscribed patriarchy onto the bodies of native peoples, naturalizing social hierarchies and colonial domination.
The imposition of heteropatriarchy serves not only to secure colonial domination for indigenous peoples, but also to secure patriarchy within the colonizing society against the threats of the alternative governance structures that indigenous societies represent. It is noteworthy that the high status of women and the relatively peaceful nature of many native societies did not escape the notice of white peoples, in particular of white women (A. Smith 2005b). A society based on domination, hierarchy, and violence works only when it seems natural or inevitable. Given an alternative, peoples will generally choose not to live under violent conditions. The demonization of native societies, as well as their resulting destruction, was necessary to securing the "inevitability" of patriarchy within colonial societies. Again, the colonialist surveillance of native bodies served the simultaneous purposes of making them visible to the state while at the same time making invisible the threat to the settler state posed by indigenous governance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Feminist Surveillance Studies by Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Shoshana Amielle Magnet. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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