Feminist Conspiracies, Security Aunties, and Other Surveillance State Fictions


Abstract

This article investigates two recent fictional representations of the feminized US surveillance state and its “security feminists” (Grewal), with an eye towards limning what visions of social transformation and political life such representations make possible. It first examines Gish Jen’s 2020 novel The Resisters, considering how the novel’s characterization of the US surveillance state as a snoopy suspicious Aunt maintains American liberal fantasies about the value of productive work and institutionally-sanctioned responses to state violence, even as the novel attempts to find grounds for reinvigorating a democratic commons. Jeff Vandermeer’s 2021 novel Hummingbird Salamander, in contrast, is suspicious of democratic visions of the social. Instead, the novel unravels the privatized figure of the “security mom” (Grewal) in order to experiment with how a queer antisocial orientation might confront environmental and institutional collapse and reimagine the idea of “security” itself.


Keywords

US surveillance state; feminism; antisocial theory; the commons; Aunty work

Berlant, Lauren. “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393–419.

Blaschke, Anne. “Running the Cold War: Gender, Race, and Track in Cultural Diplomacy, 1955–1975.” Diplomatic History, vol. 40, Issue 5, Nov. 2016, pp. 826–44.

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.

Edwards, Erica. The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire. New York University Press, 2021.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004.

Gilliard, Chris and David Golombia. “Luxury Surveillance.” Real Life. 6 July 2021, https://reallifemag.com/luxury-surveillance/.

Geidel, Molly. “Building The Counterinsurgent Girl.” Feminist Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2018, pp. 635–65.

Gopal, Anand. “The Other Afghan Women.” The New Yorker, 13 Sept. 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women.

Grewal, Inderpal. Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America. Duke University Press, 2017.

Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular.’” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 1998, pp. 442–453.

Jen, Gish. The Resisters: A Novel. Vintage Reprint, Knopf Doubleday, 2021.

Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Macharia, K’eguro. “7 Scenes with Aunties—(and a note on method).” Critical Aunty Studies: An Asynchronous Symposium. Kinship as Critical Method, 2019–2020 Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Tufts University, https://www.criticalauntystudies.com/02-enumerations.

Mannur, Anita. “Upstairs,Downstairs: The Unseen Labor of Aunties in Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox,” Critical Aunty Studies: An Asynchronous Symposium. Kinship as Critical Method, 2019–2020 Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Tufts University, https://www.criticalauntystudies.com/04-work

Martin, Theodore. Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, Columbia University Press, 2017.

Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Captialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. London: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Murphy, Michelle. The Economization of Life. Duke University Press, 2017.

Risk. Directed by Laura Poitras. Neon, 2017.

Sadowski, Jathan, Yolanda Strengers, and Jenny Kennedy. “More Work for Big Mother: Revaluing Care and Control in Smart Homes.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 14 June 2021, pp. 1–16.

Schnepf, J.D. “Domestic Aerial Photography in the Era of Drone Warfare.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 63, no. 2, Summer 2017, pp. 270–287.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick William and Laura Chrisman, Columbia University Press, 1994 [1983].

Taylor, Brandon. “Sally Rooney’s Novel of Letters Puts a Fresh Spin on Familiar Questions.” New York Times, 7 Sept. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/books/review/beautiful-world-where-are-you-sally-rooney.html?smid=url-share.

Taylor, Brandon. “bobos in Ikea: furniture, contemp fiction, and vibes.” Sweater Weather, 17 Aug. 2021, https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/bobos-in-ikea.

Vandermeer, Jeff. Hummingbird Salamander. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021.

Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press, 2011.

Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.


Published : 2022-06-15


StuelkeP. (2022). Feminist Conspiracies, Security Aunties, and Other Surveillance State Fictions. Review of International American Studies, 15(1), 51-68. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.12453

Patricia Stuelke  patricia.r.stuelke@dartmouth.edu
Dartmouth College  United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0879-2818

Patricia Stuelke is an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique (Duke UP, 2021). Her work has also appeared in journals such as American Literary History, American Literature, American Quarterly, differences, and Genre.






Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.

  1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.

  1. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

  1. User Rights

Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

  1. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.