Cam Hunters: the podcast - Season 3

Show notes

Quotes from the episode with citations:

Surveillance studies already provides some influential pleasure-related concepts, such as “empowering exhibitionism” (Koskela 2004); surveillance and performance; and sexual surveillance as a potentially cheeky form of resistance (Bell, 2009)—however, the foci are limited to a mostly sexual context.

Bell, David. “Surveillance is Sexy.” Surveillance & Society, vol. 6, no. 3, 2009, pp. 203-212.

Koskela, Hille. “Webcams, TV Shows, and Mobile Phones: Empowering Exhibitionism.” Surveillance & Society, vol. 2, no. 2/3, 2004, pp. 199-215.

Borrowing from Angela Jones (2020), “pleasure [is] infinitely different sets of gratifying social experiences. Pleasure is always subjective and contextual. Scholars must recognize that pleasure is a social experience, in which the body is caught up in what anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls ‘webs of significance’” (25). As an experience rooted in the social, pleasure is therefore contingent and historically and culturally situated.

Jones, Angela. Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry. NYU Press, 2020.

Surveillance studies’ defining feature, “is its search for commonalities among tensions indisciplinary approaches to surveillance” (Monahan and Murakami Wood, 2018: xx). The disciplines most associated with surveillance studies (such as sociology and criminology) tend to view surveillance as a pervasive method of control, governance, colonialism, policing, capitalism, and incarceration. The field is concerned with “the threat of a total ‘surveillance society’ that could lead to diminished autonomy, curtailed rights, and political repression” (ibid).

Monahan, Torin and David Murakami Wood (2018). Surveillance Studies: A reader, Oxford University Press.

In focusing on the ubiquitous surveillance of Black bodies, Browne emphasizes how “enactments of surveillance reify boundaries along racial lines” that result in “discriminatory and violent treatment” (8).

Browne, Simone (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Duke University Press.

Likewise, Beauchamp (2018) demonstrates how transgender communities—especially those multiply impacted by race and disability—are “inextricable from the surveillance and security measures that work to produce and regulate them” (6).

Beauchamp, T. (2018). Going stealth: transgender politics and U.S. surveillance practice. Duke University Press.