‘Nothing to Hide … Nothing to Fear’: Discriminatory Surveillance and Queer Visibility in Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Abstract

This chapter will ‘queer’ surveillance, interrogate the assumptions on which it is based and consider the uses to which it is put, by examining surveillance and policing practices in both the United Kingdom generally and, more specifically, in Northern Ireland, particularly as they have been directed at queer people. In the human crises engendered by surveillance, I will suggest, we also see a crisis in the meanings and value of the public, privacy, visibility and normalisation, issues that have long resonated with queer theory and queer studies.