Black Feminist Surveillance

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the critical role Black feminists have played in helping to shape and challenge the field of surveillance studies. In taking up questions that examine how issues of gender, race, sexuality, and class collide with state power–i.e., questions that have been largely left unexamined in surveillance studies–Black feminist artists, activists, and scholars are providing new and exciting directions for understanding surveillance as a mechanism of carceral logics, disciplinary power, and policing. They have enacted interventions that expose how surveillance technologies and practices are tied to systemic and interlocking forms of oppression, as well as how surveillance can be used in the service of resistance, self-defense, and freedom. An array of multidisciplinary sources will be explored such as film, literature, theories, and visual art. We’ll read Black feminist scholars such as, Simone Browne, bell hooks, Harriet Jacobs, June Jordan, Gloria Naylor, Patricia Hill Collins, Fannie Lou Hamer, Octavia Butler, and more. Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement. Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement