Biometric Technologies

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Since the turn of the 21st century, scholars have examined the technological advances and associated social implications related to the measurement and analysis of unique biological characteristics such as hand geometry and fingerprints, otherwise known as biometrics. Leading scientific journals like IET Biometrics have explored the scientific understandings and practical applications of biometric devices, such as the introduction of facial recognition technology into mass-market cell phones. Social science publications such as Surveillance & Society have investigated the social norms that inform the making of biometric technologies and their impacts on society. More specifically, these analyses have assessed the racialized, gendered, ableist, and classed contours of these emerging technologies that use the body as a metric. In fact, the earliest critical examinations of biometrics by scholars like Lyon and Pugliese focused on how normative understandings calibrated these emerging technologies to the white, able-bodied, cisgendered male body. Although additional scholars like Graham and Wood have demonstrated how digitizing surveillance through biometrics and other technologies intentionally has reinforced social inequities, they often fail to engage in analyses of race and gender. Since then, many scholars, especially women and women of color, have undertaken the study of biometrics to better understand how these technologies reinscribe power in global contexts. To do so, these scholars have added important historical, theoretical, and empirical insights that better account for how race, class, gender, ability, and other axes of social difference shape, and are shaped by, biometric technologies and their implementation. By examining the latest developments in biometrics and the aims of these technological innovations in India, Iraq, Mexico, Norway, the United States, and elsewhere, these scholars highlight and respond to critical absences in more conventional investigations of biometrics, which often ignore how power is enacted in and through these technologies. Browne’s extensive research, for example, has connected early practices of biometric branding to facilitate the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary biometric security practices in airports infused with gendered anti-Blackness. Other critical analyses examine the use of biometrics to police the poor, reinforce gender norms, pathologize disabled bodies, and regulate mobility from the diverse perspectives of those who design, implement, and experience these security practices. Through an exploration of the motivations, funding sources, and purposes of developing biometric technologies, this work takes seriously how biometrics are imbricated in the (re)constitution of power, (re)making of social difference, (re)articulation of spatialized power relations, and embodied experiences that often generate violence, anxiety, and dis-ease. In this bibliography, we organize these contributions around the who, what, where, when, why, and how of biometric systems.