This article provides an in-depth consideration of a single report penned on the night of July 27, 1919 by a private detective employed by New York City’s Committee of Fourteen (1905–1932), an influential anti-vice and police reform organization. A close reading of the undercover sleuth’s account, which details his experiences, subjective judgments, and general observations regarding moral and social conditions while aboard the Benjamin B. Odell, a palatial Hudson River steamboat, enables us to enrich our grasp of the courtship and pleasure-seeking practices popular among working women and men active in New York City’s heterosocial and largely segregated amusement landscape during the so-called “Red Summer.” Specifically, the report reveals how wage-earning women articulated femininity and sought individual freedoms, companionship, pleasure, and romance via Hudson River steamboat excursions. The relatively unsupervised atmosphere of such trips was appealing to some working women because it represented an affordable way to attain companionship, prohibited forms of amusement and entertainment, and sexual gratification, a way that sidestepped many of the reputational hazards typically associated with the search for such goods among mainland leisure spaces. Such opportunities were particularly valuable given the crackdowns on public sexuality and late-night amusement spaces that had followed America’s entry into World War I in 1917 and the advent of “wartime prohibition” on July 1, 1919. The article also supplies important contextual information required for proper appreciation of the investigation report in question, including a discussion of the methods and goals of the Committee of Fourteen and a brief overview of prior efforts by Progressive Era urban moral authorities to uncover and control “white slavery,” gambling, and other “vices” witnessed aboard steamboat excursions operating in and around New York, Chicago, and other coastal cities.
Keyword: surveillance
Review of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable by Eric A. Stanley (Duke University Press)
Eric A. Stanley’s Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable delves into the spectacle and disappearance that racialized anti-trans/queer violence produces. Stanley’s method is archival. By putting surveillance tapes, letters, films, and direct actions side by side, they trace structuring logics of modernity while emphasizing trans/queer practices that have and do escape such violent worlds. While this book underscores violence, hurt, and loss, it is more accurate to classify it as a text that tenaciously holds onto the possibility of livable worlds otherwise.
Review of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age by Brian Jefferson (University of Minnesota Press)
In Digitize and Punish, Brian Jefferson argues that the US policing and incarceration infrastructure is increasingly marked by new forms of racialized digital criminalization. Examining the incorporation of digital technologies into the criminal justice apparatus, Jefferson shows the central role that digital technology and data science has had in reinforcing racial surveillance practices since the War on Drugs and Crime began more than four decades ago. Jefferson’s timely new book traces the merging of carcerality and technology in Chicago and New York City, unveiling forms of digital racial management that have remained largely obscured from the public.
Review of Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces by Helen Kapstein (Rowman & Littlefield International)
Helen Kapstein’s book Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces positions tourism as a form of colonialism. Specifically, the author lays out the similarities between different forms of modern day tourism and how they reflect colonial practices, with reference to three foundational values: surveillance, control, and consumption. Kapstein’s book is a riveting read and is perfect for those interested in post-colonialism, tourism, the creation of real and imagined spaces and desire studies.
The Rationalization of Leisure: Marxist Feminism and the Fantasy of Machine Subordination
Critical analyses of domestic technological culture have emphasized the impact of domestic technologies on intensifying women’s labor and reinforcing its privatization within the home, all the while being marketed as laborsaving devices. Drawing from the ways the marketing of domestic technologies framed the home as a space in need of technological administration, this article offers a Marxist feminist analysis of online surveillance during leisure time, examining how the marketing of technologies for both domestic labor and online leisure helps produce relationships between subjects and technologies that double as vehicles for capital accumulation. The article argues that we should look to the history of domestic technological design to understand the ways online surveillance and data collection are used to produce revenue and impact consumer behavior, given that both domestic technologies and contemporary information technologies work to rationalize non-waged time. The article begins with the Taylorization of the home popularized in 1912, followed by the rise of domestic technologies in the 1950s, in order to demonstrate how the ideological framing of the home as a space in need of rationalization informs the marketing of today’s personalization technologies. The marketing of personalization technologies reproduces the racialized and gendered logic of machine subordination that framed domestic technologies for the home in the 20th century. The article concludes with a discussion of how Marxist feminism is a useful theoretical framework for understanding and developing a political response to online data collection, given that both the domestic sphere and online leisure time are traditionally understood to be outside the workday, and therefore supposedly outside the scope of capitalist workplace relations of surveillance and exploitation.