CFP: Talking Back Through Rhetorical Surveillance Studies: Intersectional Feminist and Queer Approaches

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Good afternoon,

Below is an exciting new Peitho CFP for a Cluster Conversation. Proposals are due October 27!!

Please email Morgan Banville and Gavin P. Johnson at rhetoricalsurveillance [rhetorical][surveillance][at][gmail][dot][com] with any questions or inquiries.

Warmly,

Morgan and Gavin

Talking Back Through Rhetorical Surveillance Studies: Intersectional Feminist and Queer Approaches

Call for Proposals for a Peitho Cluster Conversation

Edited by Drs. Morgan Banville and Gavin P. Johnson

“Surveillance,” as a critical term, invokes the systemic observational practices purposefully used when controlling bodies. Interdisciplinary researchers argue surveillance depends on emergent social structures and social processes often rendered invisible for the benefit of political, cultural, technological, educational institutions (Marx, 2015). However, only recently have researchers purposefully engaged intersectional frameworks to better understand how our identities, positionalities, and relationalities influence and are influenced by surveillance, especially when considering issues of race (Browne, 2015), gender/gender nonconformity (Beauchamp, 2019), and sexuality/queerness (Kafer and Grinberg, 2017). In their important edited collection Feminist Surveillance Studies, Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshanna Amielle Magnet (2015) argue that feminist intervention in Surveillance Studies can address the technologies of disenfranchisement that maintain normalizing structures of whiteness, able-bodiedness, heterosexuality, and cisgenderism under late capitalism. As issues of surveillance (broadly defined) are rendered increasingly visible via recent controversies surrounding reproductive justice following the overturning of Roe v. Wade; anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation, especially related to health care; content restrictions in social media, schools, and public libraries; and growing innovations in biometrics and AI, our academic scholarship and public discourse can no longer ignore or downplay increasing bodily control vis-á-vis surveillance.

From this point of view, we believe rhetoric and its collegial fields of writing, literacy, and technical communications are primed to make important contributions to the interdisciplinary conversations about surveillance. Even with limited uptake—to date: several standalone articles, one edited collection (Privacy Matters: Conversations about Surveillance Within and Beyond the Classroom), and one monograph (Working through Surveillance and Technical Communications)—important insights about surveillance have been made by scholars of rhetoric. For example, scholars in rhetoric, writing, literacy, and technical communication have investigated:

  • Surveillance as a gaze (Frost and Haas, 2017),

  • Data aggregation and commodification (Woods and Wilson, 2021),

  • Technological impacts on race and gender (Benjamin, 2019),

  • Wearables (Banville, 2020; Hutchinson and Novotny, 2018),

  • Physical tracking through biometric data (Gates, 2011),

  • Issues of authorship and copyright (Reyman, 2013; Amidon et. al, 2019),

  • Assumptions about access (Eubanks, 2011),

  • Classroom implications (Banville and Sugg, 2021; Beck et al., 2016; Johnson, 2021),

  • Professional workplaces (Andrejevic, 2007); and more.

And, while not always explicitly tied to surveillance, insights from researchers in technofeminist rhetorics also “embrace and enact the interconnectedness of technological practices and gender, race, class, and sexuality, as well as their co-constitution and shaping of each other” (Shivers-McNair, Gonzales, and Zhyvotoyska, 2019, 46). To expand these conversations, and considering our growing surveillance society, we believe intersectional feminist and queer rhetorical frameworks are essential in identifying the contours of the theoretical and historical entanglement of surveillance and rhetoric.

With this cluster conversation in Peitho, our goal is to “talk back” (hooks, 1989/2015; Browne, 2015). For hooks (1989/2015), talking back is a “gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible” (9); therefore, according to Browne (2015), “talking back…is one way of challenging surveillance and its imposition of norms” (62). Specifically, we invite talking backthrough research essays, multimodal arguments, manifestos, zines, book reviews, reimaginings of documents (i.e. what would a queering of Terms and Conditions look like), and recoveries and reconsiderations that develop and apply intersectional feminist and queer frameworks offering insight into the rhetoricity of surveillance practices. We are particularly interested in proposals that consider questions such as:

  • What affordances do intersectional feminist and queer orientations offer scholars of rhetoric, writing, literacy, technical communication, and related fields who wish to study surveillance? What constraints do these same orientations present?

  • What research methods are available to scholars hoping to address surveillance through intersectional feminist and queer frameworks?

  • How might feminist and queer frameworks address issues of agency, bodily autonomy, self-surveillance, consent, and (in)visibility as related to surveillance?

  • What rhetorical histories are impacted by the study of surveillance? How might we revisit or reframe long-established histories using the vocabulary of surveillance?

  • How do contemporary and historic surveillance technologies (digital and pre-digital) specifically impact disabled and crip communities? How does scholarship in Disability Studies and Crip Theory support or complicate feminist and queer insights on the rhetorical contours of surveillance?

  • How do contemporary and historic surveillance technologies (digital and pre-digital) specifically impact transnational, non-Western communities? How does scholarship in Decoloniality, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Studies support or complicate feminist and queer insights on the rhetorical contours of surveillance?

  • How do contemporary and historic surveillance technologies (digital and pre-digital) specifically impact Black, Indigenous, and communities of color? How does scholarship in Critical Race Theory and Antiracism support or complicate feminist and queer insights on the rhetorical contours of surveillance?

  • How can intersectional feminist and queer frameworks for rhetorical surveillance offer opportunities for resistance and intervention in dangerous policies and political agendas that encourage the multi-dimensional surveillance practices intensifying because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, as well as the banning of drag performance, trans health care, library books, and curricula addressing systemic racism and homo-/trans-phobia?

  • What ways can intersectional feminist and queer frameworks assist in understandings of the ethics of opting out (Ruti, 2017), feeling crip negativity towards (Smilges, 2023), and/or talking back (Browne, 2015; hooks, 1989/2015) to surveillance practices embedded across society?

  • How does surveillance complicate the work of archivists, especially those attempting to practice intersectional feminist and queer archival methods?

  • How is surveillance rendered visible or invisible in pedagogical settings? What roles should instructors and program administrators have in challenging the varying types of surveillance (panoptic, lateral, sousveillance, and self) that occur in academic spaces?

We invite project proposals of approximately 500 words, and welcome plans for multimodal composition. We also strongly encourage submissions from early-career scholars, graduate students, adjuncts, collaborators, and those researchers outside of traditional academic contexts. Furthermore, we are committed to enacting feminist mentoring andrhetoricalsurveillance. [rhetorical][surveillance][at][gmail][dot][com]

Timeline: Fall 2024 Cluster Conversation

  • CFP distributed September 25, 2023 (connect with us at FemRhet!)

  • 500 word proposals due October 27, 2023

  • Accepted proposals notified November 10, 2023

  • 3,000-5,000 word manuscript drafts (genre dependent) due March 1, 2024

  • Reviewer feedback provided April 30, 2024*

  • Revised manuscripts due July 1, 2024

  • Fall 2024 publication

*A note: If accepted for the cluster, our review process will entail accepted authors anonymously reviewing other accepted pieces. Please be prepared to receive an email after March 1 with de-identified submissions to review.

**See CFSHRC blog for list of references and/or email Morgan Banville and Gavin P. Johnson at rhetoricalsurveillance. [rhetorical][surveillance][at][gmail][dot][com]