[ATTW-L] #CFP Talking Back Through Rhetorical Surveillance Studies: Intersectional Feminist and Queer Approaches

[Rhetorical Surveillance]

Good afternoon,

Below is an exciting new Peitho CFP for a Cluster Conversation. Proposals
are due in *10 days!!*

Please email Morgan Banville and Gavin P. Johnson at
rhetoricalsurveillance at gmail.com
[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
ConversationEdited 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
<https://cfshrc.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=12a2ce93c492dce1f58c01a9e&id=bbb881842c&e=a3b47bbddc>,
reimaginings of documents (i.e. what would a queering of Terms and
Conditions look like), and recoveries and reconsiderations
<https://cfshrc.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=12a2ce93c492dce1f58c01a9e&id=e4776db2ba&e=a3b47bbddc>
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 and anti-racist scholarly
review/editorial practices
<https://cfshrc.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=12a2ce93c492dce1f58c01a9e&id=60747d01d9&e=a3b47bbddc>
to ensure that authors feel that their work is valued throughout the
publication process.  Questions can be directed to Morgan Banville and
Gavin P. Johnson. Please email rhetoricalsurveillance at gmail.com.
[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 at gmail.com.
[rhetorical][surveillance][at][gmail][dot][com]
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