Producing and Transgressing the Family: Intimate Technologies, State Surveillance, and C












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            * Audrey Wozniak
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            Abstract

            In China’s Xinjiang Province, narratives of counterterrorism and economic development have
            heightened regional and national securitization, including the detainment in “re-education
            one million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. Government language policies, technologic

            mass detentions, and homestay programmes intended to discipline Uyghurs into ideal politic
            enforce and transgress boundaries between the public and domestic spheres. These strategie
            coercion reinforce norms of kinship and privacy while simultaneously enacting violent tran

            over the subjects those norms produce. In this paper, I introduce the concept of “surveill
            technologies” to convey how such surveillance strategies afford the creation and maintenan

            relations they simultaneously betray. Intimate technologies such as smartphones become sit
            both social ties and surveillance. Surveillance of intimate technologies also takes the fo
            homestay campaigns to enlist over one million representatives of the Chinese state to ente

            act as “relatives”, and monitor Uyghurs for demonstrations of apparent extremism and subve
            that surveillance of intimate technologies perpetuates fantasies of a private, removed, fa
            also destabilizing its logics. These apparent perversions of kinship and family structures

            their “valid” and normative modalities and also maintain the state’s appearance as a cohes
            demonstration of its reach into a constructed domestic domain.


            Keywords: Uyghur, China, kinship, surveillance, intimate technologies

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