Seeing Shadows: The FBI Surveillance of Louise Thompson Patterson
Abstract
This article explores the ways gender and race influenced the FBI’s surveillance of Black women activists. Previous scholarship has covered the role of surveillance in repressing revolutionary movements and neutralizing radical organizations. Historically, within many social movements, Black women have been marginalized, silenced, or reduced to only their gender because of patriarchal leadership. As a result, the persistence of sexism within these Black movements has affected Black women’s visibility within movement organizations. This piece asks, how does gendered marginalization impact their surveillance by and visibility to the FBI? It seeks to understand the influence of race and gender on the FBI’s surveillance of Louise Thompson Patterson. By examining the language and narrative components of her FBI file, the article provides an analysis across gender and across time to theorize the dynamics of surveillance, race, and gender. Based on a close analysis of Patterson’s FBI file, I argue that the tension between hypervisibility and invisibility deriving from gendered stereotypes resulted in the Bureau’s vague understanding of her personal life and political ideology.
Keywords
Black women's history; FBI surveillance; Black communism; Black women's activism
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University of California at Berkeley United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5004-8836
Kiara Sample is a Master’s student in the African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies department at University of California at Berkeley. She received her BA from Washington University in St. Louis in African and African-American Studies and Psychology. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she conducted research on gender’s influence on the FBI’s surveillance of Black women activists in the 20th century. Her research interests include Black Feminism(s); Black women’s history; Surveillance; and 20th-century Black social movements.
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