Editorial: Queer Surveillance

Discipline, Erasure, and Silenced Subjectivities: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Florida's 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act

“…As a result, education is recast as a crucial site for maintaining the preconditions of laissez-faire capitalism: a mechanism for disciplining an orderly and intelligible population, versed in the vocabulary of market operations, whose individual and aggregate patterns of behavior coincide with expected and desirable patterns of behavior. Bracketed by the ideology of neoliberalism, the surveillance and silencing of queer subjects move beyond a localized disciplinary tactic and strict enactment of cis-/heteropatriarchal logic and, instead, reflect a broader strategy of monitoring and censoring dissident gender and sexuality subjects-individuals whose existence, as a whole, threatens the prevailing social order and, more specifically, the preeminent political-economic structure and organizing force of heteropatriarchy (Baxter, 2015;Butler, 1991Butler, /2001Kafer & Grinberg, 2019) At a more practical and human level, the implications of policies like PREA cannot be overstated. PREA, and the host of similarly angled legislation erupting in its wake, re-substantiate and re-produce an "othering" of individuals who identify as LGBTQ+, effectively dissuading youth from developing supportive social networks where they can discuss their sexuality or gender identity and learn about LGBTQ+ histories while conveying to students within LGBTQ+ families that their family is not appropriate to discuss in school settings-messages which individually and collectively foster stigma and shame.…”

Surveillance

“…The deployment of AI in facial recognition systems, as another example, is fraught with racial biases, given, among other things, their propensity to misidentify women of colour (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018). As for gender, as well as a growing number of feminist studies of surveillance (Taylor, 2020;Dubrofsky & Magnet, 2015), questions of gender identity increasingly feature in surveillance studies (Ball et al, 2009;Abu-Laban, 2015;Kafer & Grinberg, 2019).…”

Born digital or fossilised digitally? How born digital data systems continue the legacy of social violence towards LGBTQI + communities: a case study of experiences in the Republic of Ireland

“…Shoshana Zuboff (2019) expresses the collection of online user data for translation into behavioural data for consumption by machine learning techniques and algorithms to predict our future behaviour as 'surveillance capitalism', "an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalis and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity" (Zuboff 2019, p 11-12). Surveillance processes involve the social sorting of people into categories which are based on statistical averages or norms (Ball et al 2009;Kafer and Grinberg 2019). The act of normalisation on society, generates discrimination, exclusion and marginalisation towards anyone who does not fit into the predefined societal norms of surveillance processes, especially with categories relating to gender and sexuality (Ball et al 2009;Kafer and Grinberg 2019).…”

“…Surveillance processes involve the social sorting of people into categories which are based on statistical averages or norms (Ball et al 2009;Kafer and Grinberg 2019). The act of normalisation on society, generates discrimination, exclusion and marginalisation towards anyone who does not fit into the predefined societal norms of surveillance processes, especially with categories relating to gender and sexuality (Ball et al 2009;Kafer and Grinberg 2019). Feenburg (2002) maintains that it is the "antidemocratic values that govern technological development" rather than the technology itself that have a negative impact on society and the computer systems behind the face of social media and artificial intelligence are not impartial to biases and discrimination, they are programmed by humans who make design decisions using their own judgement and values, which in some cases may be sexist, racist or unjust (Noble 2018).…”