Murray, Heather Michelle (Author)
University of California, Irvine
Johnson, Victoria E.
Edition Details: Advisor: Johnson, Victoria E.
Physical Details: 312 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation engages in a discursive analysis of biometric technology and the cultural production of biometric bodies in four sites: the biometrics industry, national government policy, screen culture, and art practice. In excavating these sites, I insist that biometric technology be considered part of the contemporary digitalization of everyday life, part of the historical trajectory of culturally gauged visualization technologies such as photography or film, and a tool of neoliberal governance in which citizens are trained to watch each other rather than to look critically at the contradictions abundant in high-tech interactivity. Biometric bodies are often produced as monstrous, as culturally "Othered," and are often evident only when analyzing the "negative spaces" of biometric discourse, those spaces disregarded by expert culture, but made apparent through the disciplinary lens of visual studies. Critical assessment of such negative spaces required an interdisciplinary array of sources such as biometric trade magazines and advertisements, film and television texts, government documents and websites, and artworks and exhibitions. It meant personal interaction with biometric devices, made available to me at the 2006 Biometric Consortium Conference. Each chapter engages with these sources to trace out each site's understanding of biometric technology and production of biometric bodies. The bodies produced in biometrics advertising result from negotiations with the boundaries erected to "protect" proprietary algorithms that mark a product's uniqueness. National government policy, infused with personal and political desire, employs biometric technology unevenly, producing safe or threatening bodies based on longstanding constructions of sexuality, gender, race, and class. U.S. screen culture texts allow for an analysis of biometric temporality, and make clear the role of "nostalgia for the absolute" as a link between the increased use of biometric technology and its increased popular acceptance in the immediate post-9/11 moment. Art practice is a site that runs throughout my dissertation, but few of the artworks included directly address biometric technology. Rather, they question, and sometimes reinforce, the assumptions biometrics inherited from other visualizing technologies. The final chapter of my dissertation examines a variety of biometric "undoings," socio-cultural responses against biometric technology that strive to break down its logic.
...MoreDescription Explores biometrics in four areas: the biometrics industry, national government policy, screen culture, and art practice. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 70/01 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3342947.
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