Watching Women: Surveillance and Spectatorship in Women's Television

Dickason, Cara  Nash

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-v7f6-he44

Work

Watching Women: Surveillance and Spectatorship in Women's Television

Public

Download PDF

Download All Files (.zip)

This dissertation considers how women’s spectatorship—how women are imagined as viewing subjects, and what are defined as feminine ways of watching—is transformed by digital technologies, and what it reveals about the shifting nature of privacy and visibility. It maps the contours of our current configuration of gendered looking relations by analyzing a constellation of television technologies that embody new norms of surveillance and spectatorship, and television texts that grapple with those changes. Women’s television, I argue, is at the forefront of confronting the gendered stakes of such changes, revealing the complex, gendered processes of negotiation necessitated by data and visual surveillance technology that blurs the distinction between watching and being watched. The series I analyze do so by integrating surveillance and technology into their storytelling formally and narratively; their embrace of what I call surveillance aesthetics constitutes their address to a feminine spectator, as she is reimagined in the digital age. By examining the relationship between representations of surveillance in women’s television and how television technology itself shapes the dynamics of women’s spectatorship, this dissertation demonstrates that television’s current imbrication with surveillance changes how viewers are imagined and addressed. I explore how women’s television series enact modes of address that construct a feminine spectator who is constantly negotiating unstable subject positions and frames of reference created by new forms of visibility. Analyzing those modes of address alongside the television technology that imbricates watching and being watched reveals how surveillance is deployed as a form of gendered power, while treating women not as objects of the gaze, but as subjects.

Creator