Watch Yourself: The Surveillance Issue
Surveillance, contends Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, is a social and political norm. Surveillance underpins how being, and beings, are quantified and hierarchized; how anti-blackness was established and is maintained; how colonial powers rationalize their continued dominance.
Surveillance also shapes how we assert our own existences and come to try to know one another through the versions of ourselves we display—or, chillingly, have displayed for us—in various spaces and places.
What does it mean to watch yourself? For our fall issue, we’re looking for visual and written essays, interviews, comics, journalism, poetry, short fiction, and humour on the topic of surveillance.
Topics to think about:
Being watched; being policed; bodycams; bosses; prisons; property; protection; image sharing; identity theft; internet creeping; paranoia; protest; passing; safety; audiences; representation; curiosity and its relationship to difference; data collection and storage (Alexa/Siri, FitBits, smart houses, statistics, surveys); social welfare programs and control; white supremacy and cis supremacy in tech; security culture; SESTA/FOSTA; detectives; the police; national inquiries; doctor’s exams; evidence and objectivity; institutional performance assessments (school, health, employment); anti-surveillance discourse as accountability evasion; watching yourself (code switching, respectability politics, at home, at work, with friends); watching those who are not yourself; vigilance and vigilantes; and more.
Submit a short pitch (maximum 300 words) describing your proposed project no later than September 7, 2018 to submit@gutsmagazine.ca. Please include a link to or copy of a writing sample that you feel adequately represents your work. Please look over our past issues to get a sense of the kind of work we’re looking for.
First drafts will be due on October 12, 2018 and final submissions (500-4,000 words) will be due on November 9, 2018.
Compensation will be provided for contributors selected for the issue ($100-200 honorarium for written contributions; $100 for original images).
If you have any questions or comments about the submission process, please email us at submit@gutsmagazine.ca.