Hughes, Elizabeth Ann (2025) Sensing surveillance : critically examining the informal governance of bodies in the women's toilets. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
![[img]](https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Text
Hughes E, final thesis for library.pdf - Full Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 31 January 2027. Download (2MB) |
Abstract
This thesis expands the scope of surveillance beyond its dominant techno- and ocular-centric notions to explain how informal peer-to-peer governance takes place in everyday spaces. I do this by analysing contemporary anti-trans/gender-critical discourse about women’s public toilets, arguing that it reveals an informal regulation of all subjects at the level of the sensory that recirculates problematic racialised and classed stereotypes. Transphobia has become a main feature of British socio-politics and much anti-trans/gender-critical rhetoric specifically targets trans women. This previously peripheral discourse has found its footing in part because of the now rejected proposal of legal self-identification (self-ID) in 2018, which provoked mainstream anxieties about gender identity, sexual harm, and women’s safety, particularly in women-only spaces. Whilst existing research has focused on the implications of this landscape on law, policy, and the state surveillance of trans people, the role of informal governance more broadly has been overlooked. To intervene, I develop a transfeminist somatechnic framework that centres the sensory to study informal surveillance in everyday spaces. I analyse how seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching appear within a variety of materials from British anti-trans/gender-critical figures and groups, alongside literature about the public toilet. I argue that these sensory practices are part of a regulatory apparatus alive between humans in everyday spaces, which gender, race, and class subjects as part of their production. Moreover, that the sensory realm is used to legitimise problematic bio-essentialist ideas of the body as a site of innate truth, irrespective of self-ID. My research joins existing trans and queer scholarship that troubles the notion of self-ID as gendered liberation. Instead, I emphasise the expansive potentialities of sensory resistance and relational becoming.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Feb 2025 11:41 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Sep 2025 14:53 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/55011 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00055011 |
Statistics
Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.
Archive Staff Only (login required)
