ABSTRACT
We are living in a moment of unprecedented surveillance: surveillance by the state, by corporations, by media, and by technology companies, the latter amassing an almost unimaginable amount of information about us from our “data trails.” However, we are not only being watched, we also monitor ourselves and others, as a “surveillant imaginary” (Andrejevic, 2015) takes hold in contemporary culture. Most work on surveillance studies focuses on men, both as objects and actors – we need to think only of the anti-heroes Julian Assange (“WikiLeaks”) and Edward Snowden (National Security Agency), celebrated for their role in “leaking” information in the public interest. Moreover, in academia, surveillance studies remain an especially male-dominated field within sociology, political science, and digital cultural studies.
