Surveillance and the Black Female Body

From taking this class as well as the “Voices of Women of Color” class I am interested in surveillance of the Black female body both historically and in the present day. While we think of surveillance in terms of technology, I think it is also important to examine surveillance through a historical lens, to not forget the ways we as a culture have come to see the Black female body. I come at this as a white, queer, woman, and thus, not a place of authority, but as a space where, there still remain sites of overlapping and interlocking oppressions that Black women face because of the surveillance of their bodies, and how this does vary from the way white people’s bodies are surveilled and how this surveillance creates a barrier for social justice to prevail. This is an idea I am still working through and I do not have the logic worked out. David Lyon argues that “Surveillance is just one aspect of this mediated world…Surveillance does also raise questions about power, citizenship, and technological development, and about information policy, regulation and resistance”(243). He goes on to say that, “The body has steadily disappeared from these relationships [relations mediated through surveillance methods]”(244). While I do agree that face-to-face interactions have diminished, our culture continues to view Black women’s bodies as commodities on display for all to see, whether through, the slave auction block, Facebook, or MTV music videos. These mediated forms of surveillance are linked to the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and capitalist enterprises. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, “Not only are commodification and exploitation linked, patterns of exploiting Black women’s sexuality have taken many forms…For example, slave auctions brokered the commodified bodies of both Black women and men”(143). Unfortunately surveillance, commodification, and exploitation, all work together to target Black women’s bodies. Lyon suggests, “Surveillance as understood here exists on a long continuum along which data is collected and processed for a range of purposes from policing and security to consumption and entertainment”(250). Although we now think of surveillance in terms of what computer sites we visit, what banks we use, and our discount cards, if we are to believe Lyon, we must recognize the ways in which data has been collected on Black women’s bodies throughout time. Sarah Bartmann’s (the Hottentot Venus’s) body was used for entertainment purposes and watched by upper class white people in order to see the irregularities of Black women’s bodies for entertainment value. Similarly, slave purchases took place on a block where, bodies were surveilled and sold for purchase. Surveillance has played an important role in the commodification and exploitation of Black women’s bodies. In popular culture Black women’s bodies are used for spectatorship, reduced down to “booties,” and are hypersexualized. But while this is happening our culture is using these images, collected through surveillance, to monitor things like the reproductive rights of Black women. Forcing sterilization against the will of a Black woman is not uncommon, and it is no surprise given the way that surveillance has been and is used to condemn and police Black women’s bodies into a white paradigm of behavior. There is not necessarily a specific conclusion to be gained, but it is very interesting to look at the way surveillance intersects with commodification, and exploitation to discipline Black women’s bodies into conformity. This allows the dominant culture to gain and hold privilege while marginalized Black women suffer from this surveillance. I am adding the new Beyonce video in order to sort of demonstrate the ways that we now surveil, commodify, and exploit Black women's bodies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVEGfH4s5g