Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

corporate players, this paper calls for more research and public discussion regarding Internet connected
toys, as well as new policy initiatives to provide better protection for children’s privacy and security into the
future.
Tama Leaver
Intimate Surveillance: Normalising Cultures of Monitoring from Conception to Infancy
From ultrasound photos and pregnancy apps to home-delivered Bluetooth foetal heartrate monitors
connected to smartphones, monitoring and surveillance are increasingly prevalent throughout pregnancy
and the early life of infants (indeed, often beginning long before conception in cases where medical
assistance is required). Recording, digitally encoding, sharing and comparing in-utero activities with
established norms can be a source of reassurance, or great anxiety. These activities are increasingly part of
domestic settings, not just medical spaces, situating monitoring as a normal part of everyday, intimate life.
The notion of intimate surveillance thus captures an inherent contradiction: the intimacy of parents and
loved ones situates these actions as driven by the very best of intentions, but surveillance necessarily entails
the viewing, recording, encoding, analysing (and increasingly, informatic sharing) of the unborn and infant.
Moreover, normalised activities during pregnancy and infancy situate surveillance as directly linked with
parenting and caring. This paper explores these emerging cultural norms, the relationship with broader
notions of surveillance, and the challenges of generating, sharing and respecting significant amounts of data
about the unborn and infants in contexts where discussions of privacy and boundaries are urgently needed.
5I
Cinematic subjectivity and desire (Chair, Helene Strauss)
Beck Wise
The God Machine: Machinic Vision, Human Difference, and the Objective Gaze
Donna Haraway famously argued that the grounding principle of scientific objectivity is “the god trick of
seeing everything from nowhere”, such that scientific knowledge is constituted through an imagined gaze
that is disembodied, unengaged and inert: absolute, and thus irrefutable. In this paper, I argue that
visualising machines embody that imagined gaze, rendering it concrete as the work of looking is outsourced
to machines. I examine two sites where x-ray machines visualise and assess human difference: first, the
familiar spectacle of the airport full-body scanner; second, an advertising campaign designed to counter
implicit bias. Public discourses cite the x-ray machine’s objectivity and its absolute vision to establish the
authority and disciplinary power of its images, but I argue that technological design and algorithmic decisionmaking
in fact operate to reinscribe and reify the differences the machine is said to ignore, situating racist
and ablest heteropatriarchy as natural and eternal.
Samantha Lindop
Her: Machine Love and the Possibility of Disembodied Desire
This paper examines the way real-world directions in algorithmic technology and social robotics are
explored, confronted, and critiqued in the creative cultural medium of film, focusing on Spike Jonze’s Her
(2013). Men have been fantasizing about constructing the perfect replicate woman since antiquity, with
fables such as Ovid’s Pygmalion. Consistently, the idealized artificial woman is imagined as hyper-feminine
and physically “perfect,” compliant, and available. Alternatively, in Her these conventions are disrupted
through the films focus on a man who falls in love with his highly intelligent, non-corporeal computer
operating system. This raises questions about what constitutes love and desire, and in a world increasingly
mediated by technology, the kinds of directions social acceptability and norms surrounding human
relationships with machines will take in the future.
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