Surveillance and the Body in the Millennium Article Trilogy Jeff W. Marker University of North Georgia, USA
[email protected] 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. Constant developments in surveillance technology, practice, and policy have driven surveillance studies to evolve rapidly in recent decades. That evolution has also been driven by the need to reconsider the theoretical foundations and sociological scope on which the discipline is built, a necessity cited by numerous scholars, including Kevin Haggerty, Mark Andrejevic, and Catherine Zimmer. As Zimmer puts it, surveillance studies “has contended with the need to move beyond the conceptual framework of panopticism that has defined the field,” and she is far from alone in voicing this criticism (Zimmer 2015: 15).