Governmentality in the Era of the Flâneuse
Panel XV-10, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, October 17 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
By means of a feminist epistemology, what does a states’ spaces look like, what are empirical bases for assertions regarding governance, what are key metaphors of governance? A feminist epistemology allows us to access knowledge and experiences within highly-surveilled states. Veena Das (2007) states that “[the] subject is the limit of the world.” We recognize that the flâneur enjoys the full status of citizen while simultaneously embodying modern alienation, giving rise to a postmodern spectatorial gaze. Years ago, James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) introduced the term “authoritarian high modernism,” which we take on as our common problematic. We also recognize the flâneuse, with the assumption of her comparative mobility through urban space, as a means to interrupt the “authoritarian high modernism” of the (state’s) male gaze. With this in mind, how do we find our subjects’ voices and locate their experiences in the midst of state violence. Focusing on state surveillance and the usage of biometric technologies, researchers discuss three case studies in this panel. The first panelist draws on Syrian women’s narratives and their sensations toward biometric technology to examine their emotions as an affective-discursive tool of reflecting on humanitarian assistance. We discuss the material and immaterial effects of biometric technology, such as iris scanning, including the emotional and enunciatable experience of women on being the objects of an electronic gaze. The presenter argues that between the state control and politics of transnational humanitarianism, the emotional expressions of women resist the dominance and violence of two regimes. The second panelist focuses on the emotional well-being and socio-spatial marginalization of low-wage migrant workers in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). Embracing the role of the flâneuse, several presenters examine methodological challenges of conducting research in highly-surveilled states. Finally, addressing the foundation of “authoritarian high modernism” in Egypt, we draw on Carolyn Steedman’s identification on the archive’s institutional task of conveying labor and property across generations when she addresses colleague-historians, “your craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater… your anxiety is more precise, and more prosaic, it’s about PT S2/1/1, which only arrived from the stacks that afternoon, which is enormous, and which you will never get through tomorrow” (2001, p. 18). The third panelist uses metaphors drawing on such built environments as government archives, to address specific shifts in the Egyptian (state’s) male gaze. Together, the panelists present three feminist methodologies and epistemologies which together comprise a comprehensive, critical approach to state surveillance, divergent forms of governance, and subjectivity of the governed.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Elizabeth Bishop
-- Presenter
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Dr. Noora Lori
-- Discussant
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Leila Asadi
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Lisa Reber
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Leila Asadi
Reflecting on the experiences and embodied emotions of Syrian refugee women concerning Iris scanning as a highly advanced type of biometric technology first, I lay out the conditions in which the technology serves the needs of the refugees. Conversing with the current scholarships on biometric and refugee policies, I argue that Iris technology represents the state's interest and UNHCR despite its very ethical values to protect the rights and dignity of refugees, operates it. Thus the politics of compassion (Fassin 2012) is entangled with relations of domination and resistance and creates a moral dilemma for humanitarian practices. The sense of empathy for others embodied in humanitarian works conflates with a political and ethical constructed order that displays the coexistence of humanitarian responses with the subjugation of their people of concern.
I take up some of the Syrian refugee women shared stories through which their feelings such as anger, sighs, laughter, sense of humor, and poetry exemplify the sites of struggles (Sara Ahmed 2007) and forms of asserting their political consciousness as willful/troubling subjects who are subjugated ostensibly through humanitarian acts. With Iris scanning, the emotional and utterly experience of women such as laughter and humor-- of being gazed at, I discuss the hierarchy of material and immaterial effects of biometric technology. In between the state control and politics of compassion in humanitarian work, both justifying the usage of Iris, I explicate the ways in which women act and are acted upon between the state policies and the modern transnational humanitarian regime.
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Dr. Elizabeth Bishop
During the eighteen days of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, an uncountable number of citizens took part in public events. Two years later, an assessment of visibility, transparency, and governance in Nasser-era Egypt concluded with the note, “the number of Egyptian citizens who turned out to vote in the 19 March 2011 referendum on the constitutional amendments was unprecedented; following the victories (first) of members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Freedom and Justice’ party to the legislature, and (later) of Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi to the office of president” (2013, p. 83). Since that date, the ocular nature of Egypt’s state has shifted, prompting a reassessment of the Gamal Abdul-Nasser-era advances regarding modernist government in the most populous of Arab nation-states. Yasmine Ramadan’s Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction emphasizes the jil al-sittinat of novelists, with their “representation of the various spaces of, and outside, the nation [reflecting] disappointment with the increasingly repressive regimes that followed independence (2020, p. 2). Ramadan quotes the four-page stroll through Cairo in Sonallah Ibrahim’s The Smell of It (1966), and the description of Kit-Kat Square’s denizens in Inrahim Aslan’s The Heron (1976) as metaphors for the narrativity of public experience, in which developments in the public sphere (such as citizens voting, assuming seats in a legislature, taking an oath of office), are recorded as street names or people collecting in a given space. Denied access to Egyptian state archives, I use conventional sources in unconventional ways (permitting me to identify individuals representing the former Ottoman imperial family’s transnational interests, with their privately-conveyed invitations for Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to join the increasingly-unpopular Middle East Defense Organization; accountants with the Ministry of Finance’s Tax Authority auditing foreigners’ family members’ personal records; and transactions of “property of foreigners who are members of the Egyptian royal family and who attained or acquired Turkish nationality before the confiscation order” carried out within the walls of foreign embassies). Balancing transnational interests’ preference for privacy, this presentation from a forthcoming book analyzes the architecture circumstances of Mohamed Naguib’s house arrest. Fellow “Free Officers” ordered surrounding verditure stripped from his garden, draperies pulled from the windows, rendering the domicile’s every corner immediately visible by its guards. This created a Cairo panopticon, which informs both conversations about the jil al-sittinat and questions of present-day transparency.
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Dr. Lisa Reber
Gabriel was a twenty-five-year-old Nigerian man and one of forty-four low-wage migrant workers who engaged in open-ended interviews as part of a phenomenological study aimed at understanding the emotional well-being of temporary low-wage workers: “Thinking about a place like Dubai [United Arab Emirates (UAE)], where walls have ears, I think there is no place to have such conversation other than your […] car because we all know such is not allowed in [the] UAE. […] There are no extra ears listening to our conversation except us .... I feel more relaxed to open up my mind because it is just the two of us... and the sound of chatting can't be heard outside the car. [Also] when sharing my story, I guess some parts were so touching that it brought out tears. If we [were] in a coffee shop, people around [would] have been wondering what is going on .... so your car is more comfortable.” In an authoritarian, highly surveilled state, such as the UAE, pragmatic considerations drive innovations in research methodology. As Gabriel attests, the UAE is a highly surveilled state and using the researcher’s personal car as the interview location allowed the site to be relocated as needed to avoid the attention of passersby. This mobile space also provided privacy and ensured that the ears of surveillance as well as friends and coworkers were kept away. While this space did not lessen the power relations between interviewer and interviewee, it did create a non-threatening, cocooned environment that allowed trust to develop, evidenced by the willingness and freeness with which participants spoke of their circumstances and how they impacted their emotional well-being, which extended to sharing feelings of depression and suicidal thoughts.
