As science fiction author Ursula K Le Guin once wrote, „technology is how a society copes with physical reality.“ The proliferation of technologies tracking the faces, movements, and decisions of populations around the world have been defended by those who suggest that collective security in the post-9/11 era is well worth potential losses in individual privacy. How can feminist ethics respond to the increasing use of surveillance as a tool of securitisation? Using human experience and lived reality as a starting point, this paper explores the ways in which real-time surveillance and constant monitoring through surveillance technologies impact the lives of those being watched, and asks what possibilities for change are created when we foreground feminist ethical considerations of care in thinking about surveillance. From drones over the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the invasive real-time surveillance inflicted on whistleblowers (and increasingly, on the general public), the ethical implications of surveillance are wide-reaching and complex, calling into question notions of control, power, and the role of technology in lived human experience. This paper builds on the small but valuable field of feminist surveillance studies to argue that the temporal element of these invasive surveillance technologies creates new possibilities for thinking about control, securitisation, and care. How does lived daily reality change when an individual knows she is being constantly watched from a hovering drone, or through undetectable software installed on her laptop? This paper seeks to explore feminist understandings of experience and relationality to answer this question, and argues in favour of a more critical theoretical reading of real-time and constant surveillance technologies that acknowledges its uniquely dangerous impacts on human lives. Through a critical engagement with ethics, this analysis suggests an opening for creative forms of feminist resistance which can respond to the dehumanising, omnipresent forces of surveillance in modern societies.

Dr Jillian Terry is an Assistant Professorial Lecturer and Deputy Director of LSE100 at the London School of Economics. Her broad research interests lie in feminist International Relations theory, focusing in particular on the ethics of war and moral justifications of contemporary warfare practices. Jillian completed her PhD in International Relations at the LSE in 2016 under the supervision of Professor Kim Hutchings, and her doctoral research theorised a feminist ethical framework with which we can better understand the moral complexities of 21st century war, including the use of drones, private military security companies, and counterinsurgency tactics. Currently, Jillian’s research includes projects on ethics in feminist security studies, the relationship between art, experience, and war, and an investigation into the value of co-teaching in interdisciplinary higher education. More generally, her research interests are in theoretical understandings of gender and international politics, the impact of war on women, and feminist surveillance studies. Jillian’s work has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics and by Oxford University Press in the 2015 volume Gender and Private Security in Global Politics.

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