(SHIRLEY)
Due to advances in mobile phone technology it has become possible to photograph/film people without their knowledge, and due to advances in online publishing it has become possible to put this imagery in the public arena. This has led to the surveillance of women taking a sinister turn - disturbingly sites such as FlickR and Youtube have become platforms for photographs and videos of women, taken surreptitiously, presented as erotica. Of particular relevance to this virtual road trip is the fact that most of these images seem to be taken on public transport where women are simply trying to get from A to B.
Liz Kelly argues for such things to be seen as part of a continuum of sexual violence that includes unwanted sexual attention such as wolf-whistling at one extreme, and rape at the other. ‘The fact that some women only experience violence at the more common, everyday end of the continuum is a difference in degree not in kind’ (p.105) Under this definition, most women will have been the victims of sexual violence at some point. Kelly is not arguing to lessen our response of horror at the act of rape, but to understand that all these actions are part of patriarchal control that keeps women are at the mercy of unwanted sexual attention. As Lafrance writes, ‘this model allows one to understand the everyday experiences of fear, intimidation, and humiliation as systematically related to the less common, yet more violent events, labelled as ‘crimes’. (p.104)
Fears of panoptic-like online censorship and complaints of Big Brother-type CCTV seems to be something of a male obsession in a patriarchal society, as I would argue women are already more than familiar with living under surveillance. The panopticon’s power is that the subjects do not know whether they are being watched but know that the possibility is always there - and this is absolutely relevant to the footage shown above. Malek Alloula’s theory of the threat of the veiled Muslim woman is particularly interesting in this context; he argues that her look is equivalent to the male gaze of the camera and that the West’s horror of her oppression is actually a horror at her ability to observe without being observed.
After my initial fury at finding these videos, photographs and misogynist comments I began to see them as documentary evidence of the position of women in a patriarchal society; and are useful in showing the extent of surveillance, objectification and sexually threatening behaviour that women live under. Rather than spoken, or inferred it is documented. Instead of suffering in (seemingly) paranoid isolation we witness gender-specific treatment.
This panoptic element of the internet can be used for feminist means too – the Blank Noise collective in India seeks to expose Eve Teasing, a form of sexual harrasment in which lone women are singled out for unwanted sexual attention. One of Blank Noise's interventions encourages women to mark and photograph the site of their harassment and display it online in an archive – ‘This site is a witness and your photograph is your testamonial’. The project is exemplary in the internet’s potential for otherwise isolated women to experience a sense of agency in their collective resistance and to see that they are not alone.
