Surveillance Tech and Sexuality

3 units

This interdisciplinary advanced course examines how members of marginalized communities and those constructed as deviants are surveilled, banished or restricted from space. We will explore how places are constructed as dirty, leading to over-policing, criminalization, and surveillance. Through the lens of Black and Latinx queer and feminist geographies, we will explore topics such as sexuality and place-making, transnational queer migrations, queer ecologies, surveillance and carcerality and the queering of public and private spaces. The course also examines the politics of space, how spaces are contested and deconstructed, and who is included or excluded within these spaces. We will learn from anti-colonial feminists about state processes of removing people from the land and historical and contemporary examples that fuel the legacy of gentrification, criminalization and land speculation. We will investigate how policing works with policy and private interests to change neighborhoods. Central to the course is an inquiry into what anti-carceral movements can learn from communities at the margins and how these insights can contribute to building geographies of freedom.