| dc.description.abstract | In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar, and ambiguous relationship to one
another. Information is plumbed from the body but treated as separate from it, facilitating, as Irma van der Ploeg has suggested,
the creation of a separate virtual 'body-as-information' that has affected the very ontology of the body. This 'informatization of the
body' has been both spurred and enabled by surveillance techniques that create, depend upon, and manipulate virtual bodies for a
variety of predictive purposes, including social control and marketing. While, as some feminist critics have suggested, there
appears to be potential for information technologies to liberate us from oppressive ideological models, surveillance techniques,
themselves so intimately tied to information systems, put normative pressure on non-normative bodies and practices, such as those
of queer and genderqueer subjects. Ultimately, predictive surveillance is based in an innately conservative epistemology, and the
intertwining of information systems with surveillance undermines any liberatory effect of the former. | |
