Review of "Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance" by Cara Dickason

It takes a village to raise a child (and write a book).
Mothering in the surveillance state

Sophie Hamacher and Jessica Hankey, eds. Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance. MIT Press, 2023.

Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, edited by Sophie Hamacher with Jessica Hankey, explores what it means for mothers to watch and be watched. As Hamacher describes in her preface, watching is central to motherhood; mothers have long stared “incessantly” at their babies, learning about them and trying to keep them safe, while babies return their mother’s gaze (6). Today, corporations sell domestic technologies to mothers to track their children as a form of care at the same time that the state and society surveil mothers’ performance of that care.

While other scholarship has explored this care/control binary of domestic and familial surveillance, what sets this edited collection apart from others is its form. Hamacher and Hankey have assembled a thrillingly interdisciplinary group of around fifty scholars, artists, and activists to contribute visual art, poetry, short essays, and interviews. Some of these works are repurposed from other venues or publications, while others have been created especially for the collection. Many contributions come from interdisciplinary fields—such as science and technology studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Black studies—or they represent interdisciplinary interventions into fields like English, history, or law. In effect, the variety and the myriad perspectives of the contributors create a feeling like walking through an exhibition, giving readers freedom to linger on the pieces that resonate most with them. In total, however, the contributions to this edited collection raise important questions about the gendered and racialized dimensions of state, corporate, and social surveillance and their material effects on mothers, the category of motherhood, and the act of mothering.

What works particularly well about the collection’s approach is that it captures a tension of scale—it deals with large questions of global movements and state power but continually grounds them in the “smaller” everyday experiences of women and mothers. Of course, the investment in everyday life is not new to feminist scholarship, especially on surveillance. By centering everyday life, the book builds upon foundational collections such as Feminist Surveillance Studie [1] [open notes in new window] from 2015, and Expanding the Gaze: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance[2] from 2019, as well as sociological research on familial surveillance.[3]

However, as the intersection of media studies and surveillance studies increasingly explores the abstractions of data, algorithms, and computation, the collection as a whole challenges us to examine monitoring as it is experienced practically and emotionally. Those women whose everyday experiences are captured here include incarcerated women, immigrant mothers separated from their children, academic and artist mothers, working-class women, trans women, women who mother children who are not biologically their own. In addition, because of the short length and/or interview format of many of the contributions, Supervision serves as a useful gateway to many key concepts explored at greater length and more depth in these authors’ other publications as well as the work of other surveillance studies scholars. While the short scholarly essays provide a stylistically more traditional (and still urgent) analysis of the power dynamics of surveillance and motherhood, the interviews and creative works in the collection serve to inflect those essays with pathos, insisting that readers see and feel those power dynamics across the many ways that people experience motherhood.

Like the works contained within the book, Hamacher and Hankey’s approach to creating it foregrounds the realities of everyday life for mothers and those who mother. Their production process offers an alternative to traditional forms of scholarship and creative work often misaligned with motherhood. They demonstrate that meaningful scholarly contributions do not have to reproduce forms that exclude those who can only produce their work in the margins of their days. As Hamacher explains in the introductory conversation with the contributors, many of whom identify as mothers, the book came together between 2018 and 2023. This period, of course, includes the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which parents experienced isolation and took on new burdens of childcare. Hankey explains,

“Our approach to assembling this book made it possible for you to work on it ‘around the edges’ of days dominated by teaching and infant care, as Ursula Le Guin once described doing creative work while caring for her kids… There’s a particular approach to time that informs much of the work in this volume: the book unfolded within the gaps between other daily responsibilities, rather than being the outcome of open-ended contemplation” (20).

One result of this process is that, as Hamacher describes in some of her interviews with scholars, activists, and artists, Hamacher’s own sense of the project changed over time based on the directions pursued by the contributors and interviewees. Some interviews start with Hamacher’s describing her own interest in the gaze of the baby monitor and asking about whether a mother watching over her child is a form of surveillance. Her interviewees sometimes push back on that characterization and take the conversation in new directions, such as the intervention of the state in Black families (87) or the primacy of survival over privacy for a trans woman of color and her family (99). These interviews, and the book as a whole, illustrate a process of critical, creative thinking—an active working through ideas in conversation with others. And together, these many contributors construct the threads that form the main themes of the book: the role of technology in expanding a mother’s ability to watch their children, the uneven social and state surveillance that mothers experience, the role of surveillance in enforcing racial inequities, the strategic deployment of “undersurveillance” of women and children of color, and the importance of motherhood as a subject of art.

Several contributions explore new forms of watching that mothers learn to enact and the technologies that enable them, forms of watching that blur the line between surveillance and care. Watching one’s child begins even before birth. Lisbeth Kaiser points out in her interview with Hamacher that the availability of more frequent ultrasounds produces a feeling that one will have more control by seeing images of their fetus, and the ability to monitor in this way reinforces the desire to do so: “It’s like because the technology is there, suddenly you have to see it” (24). In her interview, Laëtitia Badaut Haussman similarly argues that technologies, like baby monitors, turn monitoring into “an obsessive-compulsive disorder” (32) insofar as they allow mothers to track and archive a child’s image and data. In opposition to this obsessive monitoring, Haussman describes a form of close observation in which she sees herself as “a witness to my daughter’s life” (34).

Many of the contributors describe or express their own ambivalence about the kinds of monitoring and self-surveillance encouraged by domestic technologies. Sarah Blackwood describes the comforting feelings of care and control she got from obsessively tracking her breastfeeding, even if the data was not practically helpful (71). Hamacher’s visual contributions “Film Stills” and “Biometrics” include stills of cell phone footage from walks with her daughter, medical documentation of women’s bodies, baby monitor stills, and ultrasound images, all of which punctuate the claims made by authors in the collection about just how much has been made visible through surveillance technology (45). Sabba Elahi’s embroidery, titled “the suspect is my son,” depicts fish-eye images of a mother and son seemingly captured by security cameras at home while breastfeeding and in a supermarket (73-74). The mother wears a hijab in the market, and the title suggests the surveillance camera’s criminalization of her child. At the same time, the images capture moments of intimacy between them. These embroidered images gesture toward another through-line of Supervision: the interconnection between domestic monitoring and institutional or state surveillance as a tool of power. Hannah Zeavin argues that technologies like baby monitors and nanny cams market peace of mind and safety for children, but ultimately they reinforce state power through alliances like that between Amazon’s Ring technology and police departments. At the same time, they also reify class and racial hierarchies when used to discipline domestic workers. Zeavin writes,

“Care is a mode that accommodates and justifies surveillance as a practice, framing it as an ethical ‘good’ or security necessity, instead of a political choice” (38).

Another powerful thread running through this collection is the racializing effect of surveillance and the racializing of motherhood. The Black feminist scholarship of Hortense Spillers in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” and Simone Browne in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness is implicitly or explicitly foundational to many of the contributions. In the introductory conversation, Alexis Pauline Gumbs cites Spillers, arguing that

“the history of slavery in the United States and the violence against racialized immigrants in this current moment make very clear that motherhood is a status, a privilege granted not by the action of an individual but by the state—and which can also be taken away by the state” (17).

She, and others throughout the collection, contrasts that version of motherhood with mothering, as an action and form of labor that is practiced beyond the biological or nuclear family. Many contributors write in both personal and scholarly voices about the heightened scrutiny that Black mothers and other mothers of color face, both socially and by the state. Jennifer Hayashida’s poem “We Stand in the Gray Spring Light” evocatively describes the experience of being a mother of color in a predominantly white place with the feeling of “watching others watch us watch our daughters” as she and a friend spend time outside (29). In an interview, performance artist Jade Phoenix Martinez describes being policed by other parents and children in public early on in her gender transition before she was able to pass as cis (97).

Social surveillance enforces norms of motherhood and femininity, including whiteness, that are central to state-making projects. Activist and scholar Keeonna Harris connects the social surveillance of mothers to the 19th-early 20th century Cult of True Womanhood and the idea that women were supposed to lead their families by example. Harris argues that the social/societal surveillance is inextricable from state surveillance—it is an arm of state surveillance, sometimes literally, when people call the police on mothers “failing” to mother the “right” way (151). Contributors like Michele Goodwin, Jennifer C. Nash, Melina Abdullah, and Priscilla Ocen point to the ways that the state directly polices mothers through welfare programs like WIC (44) or legislation like fetal protection laws that disproportionately criminalize poor mothers of color, who are far more likely to have their children taken away by the state (165). Caitlin Keliiaa and Stephanie Lumsden tell Hamacher in their interview about state surveillance of Native people under the guise of “care,” including laws which authorized the “kidnapping and de facto enslavement of Indian children,” the deployment of Child Protective Services to destroy Native families, and mass sterilization by the federally-run Indian Health Services (182-183). Many contributors describe their own experiences as mothers in the face of state surveillance strategies; Abdullah and Harris, for instance, both describe the experience of having to teach their children to self-surveil and self-regulate to keep them as safe as possible while living under state surveillance that criminalizes them.

In conversation with Black feminist scholarship on the simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility of Black women, many contributors explore the state’s strategic deployment of invisibility or obscurity to reinforce gendered and racialized violence and inequity. Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle posits that Black women are both hypersurveilled and “undersurveilled” (129). She asks, “Which bodies are afforded the benefits of state surveillance under the guise of safety and security, and which bodies are relegated to being ghosted” (132)? She shares the story of Kira Johnson, who died eleven hours after her c-section because doctors repeatedly refused to scan her body, despite her pleas. Hinkle asks the reader to consider,

“What if the same resources that go into ‘protecting’ assets, institutions, and ideologies went into the care and supervision of pregnant Black womxn and their children” (135)?

What is not tracked by the government reveals as much about its investments (literal and figurative) as what it does track.

Lauren Whaley points out that in 2007, the federal government stopped publishing data of pregnancy-related deaths because of “incomplete reporting by states” (92). Ocen and Lisa Cartwright discuss the simultaneous hyper- and under-surveillance of mothers and children in government prisons and detention centers. In her essay, Cartwright describes the complex visuality of ICE detention centers in their “family separation” policy. In detention centers, children are watched but not mothered:

“The detention center is, in effect, a machine for unmothering the child while continually watching it, lest it act out or try to get free” (80).

Detention centers use cameras to accumulate data, but not to provide care, and they justify the lack of public documentation that allows for these abusive systems to continue by citing privacy laws meant to protect children. Ocen similarly describes how every aspect of incarcerated women’s lives are surveilled by the state, but “prisons obscure these forms of surveillance from the public,” hiding the reproductive and other abuses those women suffer at the hands of the state (165). Together, such contributions to Supervision powerfully convey the myriad ways that the government and other institutions deploy surveillance to (re)produce and enforce racial and class hierarchies.

Supervision also asserts and enacts the significance of motherhood as a subject of art and mothers as creators of art. In an interview Irene Lutzig affirms the stigma around art about motherhood, and the importance of building a network of mother-artists (69). Nash argues that self-representation by Black women “is often an act of rejecting controlling images and insisting on the complexity of the self (and its relationship to others)” (17). While asserting that “freedom [cannot] be achieved in the visual field alone,” she says that she is moved by artworks like the self-portraits of Ming Smith and Cary Beth Cryor featured in Supervision “in part because they are efforts to represent vulnerability—and vulnerability is something that has so long been denied to Black women, especially as we are represented in the media” (17). Smith’s “Self Portrait (Total)” depicts the artist breastfeeding and photographing herself in the mirror, both hands on her camera as her child sits on her lap holding her torso (137). Meanwhile, Cryor’s “Rites of Passage no. 1” features the artist’s view from the delivery room as her baby exits her body, the blurred head of the doctor, the lights above, and the mirror in which we see the artist holding the camera and the doctor reaching for her baby’s head in her vagina (162-163). Visual art throughout the book powerfully captures many complexities of motherhoods. Hamacher transforms 17th to 19th century medical images of gestation by folding them, distorting the bodies they aim to medicalize (111). Tala Madani depicts caretakers as ghostly figures or “shit moms” made of literal shit (30-31).

Pieces of creative writing in Supervision contribute to the collection’s emotional depth, dimensionalizing the experiences described in essays and interviews. A series of texts written by Magdalena Kallenberger to her absent partner when she was taking care of her 2 year old child document her child’s (lack of) sleep and behavior at the same time that they track her own deteriorating mental state (107). Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ moving poem “Heavy Swimmers” expresses deep empathy for Ebony Wilkerson, “a black mother who drove herself / and her children into the Atlantic Ocean,” telling her “and yes your babies / who survived / they will one day / understand” (145-149). Supervision is curated evocatively, with Gumbs’ poem preceded by images from Hinkle’s “The Evanesced” collection, inspired by archives of colonial postcard images of West African women and the photo archive of a serial killer who targeted marginalized women, as well as “early risqué dirty-blues songs by Black femme musicians” (132).

Supervision enacts what it means to do scholarly and creative work as a collective of mothers, and it consistently speaks to the need to view motherhood through the lens of collectivity rather than the individual. Gumbs importantly states in the introductory conversation that “the state can only process us as individuals. Therefore, there is no ‘community motherhood,’ only community mothering which does not confer status” (18). For her, “community practices of mothering” have the potential to exceed the state’s way of seeing mothers. This idea resonates throughout Supervision. Abdullah advocates for realizing the common phrase “it takes a village” to raise children through community-building and other-mothering. Martinez pushes back on Hamacher’s question about gendered labor imbalances during the pandemic because she is part of a two-mother household. In embodying the feminist truism that the personal is political and vice versa, the collection brings attention to the material needs of all kinds of mothers and foregrounds the importance of activism connected to the field of feminist surveillance studies.

These calls to see motherhood as collective action resonate powerfully in the midst of current global and domestic power struggles. I read Supervision while encountering steady streams of images of mothers and children murdered and starved in Gaza, and news updates on the latest abortion restrictions in the United States, humanitarian crises at the U.S.-Mexico border, and laws limiting gender-affirming care passed in the name of “parental rights.” The work in Supervision, and the feminist politics it engages, helps us see how the state deploys surveillance in ways that violently limit what kinds of women, mothers, and motherhood are counted or valued. The collection ultimately argues that such problems cannot be solved by individuals, but only through understanding ourselves as part of a community and enacting measures to counter the control.