Disruptive exhibitionism - a performance methodology for surveillance art

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen an increase in work that critically names surveillance as a colonial logic, technology, and practice (see Browne 2015; Maynard 2017; Cahill 2019; Cahill 2021). To contribute to this turn, we propose ‘disruptive exhibitionism,’ a theoretical and methodological concept for surveillance performance art developed through the lenses of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and queer positivity that center practices of care and pleasure as forms of resistance against surveillance structured by the violence and exploitation of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The aim of this article is to develop disruptive exhibitionism as a methodology for surveillance performance art and research-creation that offers a way for marginalized identities and bodies to engage with visibility, where public visibility may be fraught or even dangerous. Disruptive exhibitionism builds on Koskela’s (2004) important concept of ‘empowering exhibitionism,’ which suggests that individuals might resist surveillance by using surveillant technologies to self-represent and publicly ‘expose’ oneself voluntarily. Disruptive exhibitionism expands empowering exhibitionism to consider (a) those subjectivities and bodies whose public visibility has been erased and/or rendered dangerous and (b) how contemporary corporate culture, white feminism, and postfeminism have co-opted ‘empowerment’ (Banet-Weiser 2018; Beck 2021).