Surveilled women : subjectivity, the body and modern panopticism

Abstract

"Surveilled Women: Subjectivity, The Body and Modern Panopticism" explores the ways in which surveillance enacts the power to limit the self definition and thus the subjectivity of the female subject. Understanding the body as being intimately connected to the development of an autonomous female subject, surveillance is examined as a means of maintaining social structures of gender, race, and class. Technologies of surveillance are shifting the epistemological and ontological status of the body, undermining it as a verifiable means of knowing the world and ourselves. Arguing for a feminist revaluing of the body, surveillance is understood as creating powerful social norms, crucial to the maintenance of existing power structures, including patriarchy, race, consumerism and the media. Analyzing such various subjects as Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the death of Princess Diana, biometrics, and the Internet, this thesis explores the various applications of surveillance in these texts and the ways in which modern panopticism, through the development of target marketing, is changing the ways in which we view our world, ourselves and our social structures.