Surveillance and the Body in the Millennium Trilogy

Abstract

A growing discourse in surveillance studies is leading the field away from socially neutral theories and introducing methodologies that account for factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. However, scholarship on surveillance in the arts, among which voyeurism and panopticism remain dominant, has been slower to adopt models that address these sociological dimensions of surveillance. This interdisciplinary article argues for expanding the theoretical and sociological scope of scholarship on surveillance in the arts, using Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels and the Swedish films adapted from them as a case study. This series of narratives features three scopic regimes: the state’s surveillance apparatus, the protagonist’s own surveillant gaze, and the male gaze, each of which operates on and through the body of the central character, Lisbeth Salander. These representations, as so many others, demand that we break away from the panoptic model and employ a theoretically intersectional approach. The author integrates theories from surveillance studies, feminist film theory, and the social sciences to develop such an approach.