Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance
A wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind anthology of art and writing exploring how surveillance impacts contemporary motherhood.
The tracking of our personal information, activities, and medical data through our phones and smartwatches is an increasingly recognizable field in which the lines between caretaking and control are blurring. In our social media and digital surveillance age, mothers' behaviors and bodies are observed, made public, exposed, scrutinized, and policed like never before. Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, an interdisciplinary anthology edited by Sophie Hamacher with Jessica Hankey, gathers together the work of forty contributors, both established and emerging figures in their respective fields, to ask what the relationship is between how we watch and how we are watched, and how the attention that mothers pay to their children might foster a kind of counterattention to the many ways in which mothers are scrutinized.
Just as motherhood intersects with multiple aspects of daily life, so does Supervision touch on mass incarceration, medicine, psychology, sociology, environmental studies and ecology, politics, and art. A groundbreaking collection, Supervision is a project about vision (and supervision), and all the ways in which vision intersects with surveillance and politics, through motherhood and personal history as well as through the histories and relations of the societies in which we live.
Contributors
Melina Abdullah, Jeny Amaya, Nurcan Atalan-Helicke, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Sarah Blackwood, Lisa Cartwright, Cary Beth Cryor, Duae Collective, Moyra Davey, Sabba S. Elahi, Laura Fong Prosper, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Lily Gurton-Wachter, Sophie Hamacher, Jessica Hankey, Keeonna Harris, Jennifer Hayashida, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Lisbeth Kaiser, Caitlin Keliiaa, Magdalena Kallenberger, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Stephanie Lumsden, Irene Lusztig, Tala Madani, Jade Phoenix Martinez, Iman Mersal, Jennifer C. Nash, Erika Niwa, Priscilla Ocen, Litia Perta, Claudia Rankine, Ming Smith, Sable Elyse Smith, Stephanie Syjuco, Yesenia R. Vargas, Lauren Whaley, Kandis Williams, Mai'a Williams, Carmen Winant, Kate Wolf, and Hannah Zeavin
MIT Press, 2023
Hardcover, 208pp
261 x 207mm
