QUEERNESS AFF/NEG
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1AC
No Plan Version
Increasingly technological surveillance practices in the status quo force queer bodies to the margins – data analysis founded upon pattern and predictability reinforces exclusion of nontraditional gender identities.
Conrad 9 Surveillance, Gender, and the Virtual Body in the Information Age, Kathryn Conrad Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. Surveillance & Society 6(4) p 381-385
Tied closely to the surveillance and regulation of sexual behaviour and identity—tied in part because of the ways gender identity and sexual object choice are linked in the West—is the surveillance and regulation of gender. The genderqueer body—the intersexed, the hermaphroditic, the transgender(ed), the transexual, and even the 'effeminate male' or the 'masculine' female—is one that does not conform to the accepted biological binary of 'man' and 'woman' and/or its attendant 'masculine' and 'feminine' behaviours and physical markers.11 The history of lesbian and gay activism is closely tied to that of genderqueer activism (perhaps first and most obviously with the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969, which saw the birth both of contemporary gay rights activism and transgender activism), and activism to challenge the gender system is one strategy for confronting a system into which genderqueers have not fit. But even those who are 'out' about their genderqueer status must often 'pass' as one of two genders in order to survive—quite literally—in a two-gendered world. According to the group Gender Education and Advocacy, the between 1970 and 2004, 321 murders of trans people have been tallied; and 'more than one new anti-transgender murder has been reported in the media every month since 1989' (GEA 2004a, c2004b). Although gathering reliable statistics for the number of people killed because they were genderqueer is impossible, these statistics along with more publicised cases, such as that of the murder of Brandon Teena in 1993, suggest that being readably genderqueer, at least in the West, still comes with significant risk. Information technologies, as I have suggested above, have given some gender and queer theorists people hope for liberation from the sometimes oppressive gendered discourses that accompany biological embodiment. But surveillance, whether driven by criminology or marketing, has, as I have suggested above, been the engine for the very informatisation of the body in which these feminist and queer theorists have placed their hope. Further, surveillance, particularly the surveillance tied to prediction, is not only a use to which information technologies have been put; it is also the inspiration for many of the new developments in information systems technology. And the patterns that those information systems create, collect, and circulate are, in turn, intricately and inextricably bound up with surveillance technologies. This, I would suggest, should lead gender and queer theorists away from information technologies as a tool for the transformation of the human subject. The predictive models that are at the centre of current surveillance technologies have been created with the goal of prediction and therefore control of the future, but they must rely on the past to do so. The past provides the patterns from which the models take their shape. Given this, predictive models, and the surveillance systems that feed them, are inherently conservative. By this I do not mean to suggest that they are particularly politically conservative; indeed, many political conservatives are just as invested in the ideology of privacy that surveillance constantly transgresses. Rather, predictive models fed by surveillance data necessarily reproduce past patterns. They cannot take into effective consideration randomness, 'noise', mutation, parody, or disruption unless those effects coalesce into another pattern. This inability to accommodate randomness may simply suggest that predictive models are ineffective. But they are not ineffective; like other surveillance techniques discussed above, they are normative. The potentially normative effect of predictive surveillance might be clearest, and of most concern, in the case of the transsexual body who has transitioned from one gender to another. The virtual body created by data, in the case of a transsexual person, appears contradictory, confusing; the data history for a trans person comprises two bodies (male and female) rather than one genderqueer body. A hopeful reading, inspired perhaps by an optimistic (and selective) reading of Butler, would be that this contradictory data would have the effect of destabilising the gender system. But rather than abandoning the gender system that the transsexual / genderqueer body clearly transgresses, predictive surveillance technology, relying on past data as it does, can only reinforce it. The material body would thus be pressured to conform or be excluded from the system. Further, Lyon's concerns about 'leaky containers' of data are heightened when one's data history does not fit into accepted norms. The Director of the National Center for Transgender Equity in the United States, Mara Keisling, has discussed the potential impact of surveillance technologies on transgendered persons, expressing the fear that, for instance, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags embedded in identification cards—an option initially considered in the United States REAL ID Act of 2005—would allow for the private gender data of a genderqueer person to be read from afar by those with RFID readers (Keisling 2007; NCTEquality 2008). As suggested above, the risks attending the exposure of personal data for a genderqueer person can be profound. Just as importantly, however, dataveillance that is tied to predictive strategies further embeds the very norms those bodies challenge. At the level of the everyday, such technologies put subjects' ability to control their own self-presentation—and their own decisions to accept, challenge, or 'pass' within the system—even further out of their hands.
This influx of surveillance begs the question of what a body is and defines the acceptable body in relation to its comprehensibility – normative gender standards determine the ‘aliveness’ of a subject.
Puar 09 [Jasbir Puar, professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, http://planetarities.web.unc.edu/files/2015/01/puar-prognosis-time.pdf]//JIH
These are of course older historical questions about the changing contours of what counts as a living body, reanimated by emergent technologies. Surveillance technologies and related bioinformatic economies – DNA encoding and species preservation, stem-cell research, digitization, biometrics, life logging devices, regenerative medical sciences, whose role includes increasing the contact zones and points of interface between bodies, and their subindividual capacities (not to mention related technologies developed to manage the constant amassing of information) – renew all sorts of questions about bodies and their materialities. What is a body in informational terms? Where does a body – and its aliveness – begin and where does it end? If we view information itself as a form of life (or life itself as a compendium of information) we might be led to ask: What is a life? When does it begin and end? And, who owns it? What defines living? In turn, what counts as a death – as dying?6 Why, as Donna Haraway once asked, should a body end at the skin? (1991). Kaushik Sunder Rajan favors the formulation ‘‘biocapital’’: neoliberal circuits of political economy which he argues are generating incipient forms of materiality as well as changing the grammar of ‘‘life itself.’’ New forms of currency – biological material and information – simultaneously produce the materialization of information on the one hand, and a decoupling from its material biological source on the other. As such, we have a constitutive contradiction informing this dialectic between bodily material and information: ‘‘information is detached from its biological material originator to the extent that it does have a separate social life, but the ‘knowledge’ provided by the information is constantly relating back to the material biological sample . . . It is knowledge that is always relating back to the biological material that is the source ofthe information; but it is also knowledge that can only be obtained, in the first place, through extracting information from the biological material’’ (Sunder Rajan 2006, 42). If the value of a body is increasingly sought not only in its capacity to labor but in the information that it yields – and if there is no such thing as excess, or excess info, if all information is eventually used or is at least seen as having imminent utility – we might ask whether this is truly a revaluing of otherwise worthless bodies left for dying. If statistical outliers as well as species can live through DNA, what does it mean to be debilitated or extinct? Are all bodies really available for rehabilitation?
This violent social system determines the meaning individuals assign to themselves – antiqueerness functions as a system of self-surveillance and leads to the suppression of the queer soul.
Yep et al., 2003 [Lovaas, and Elia, Professors @ San Francisco University, Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp. 21-22]//JCE
These are the internal injuries that individuals inflict upon themselves. Very early in life children learn from interpersonal contacts and mediated messages that deviations from the heteronormative standard, such as homosexuality, are anxiety-ridden, guilt-producing, fear-inducing, shame-invoking, hate-deserving, psychologically blemishing, and physically threatening. Internalized homophobia, in the form of self-hatred and self-destructive thoughts and behavioral patterns, becomes firmly implanted in the lives and psyches of individuals in heteronormative society. Exemplifying the feelings and experiences of many people who do not fit in the heteronormative mandate, Kevin Jennings (1994) tells us his personal story: I was born in 1963. . .[I] realized in grade school that I was gay. I felt absolutely alone. I had no one to talk to, didn’t know any openly gay people, and saw few representations of gays in the media of the 1970s. I imagined gay people were a tiny, tiny minority, who had been and would always be despised for their “perversion.” Not once in high school did I ever learn a single thing about homosexuality or gay people. I couldn’t imagine a happy life as a gay man. So I withdrew from my peers and used alcohol and drugs to try to dull the pain of my isolation. Eventually, at age seventeen I tried to kill myself, like one out of every three gay teens. I saw nothing in my past, my present, or (it seemed) my future suggesting that things would ever get any better. (pp. 13-14) Heteronormativity is so powerful that its regulation and enforcement are carried out by the individuals themselves through socially endorsed and culturally accepted forms of soul murder. Soul murder is a term that I borrow from the child abuse and neglect literature to highlight the torment of heteronormativity (Yep, 2002). Shengold (1999) defines soul murder as the “apparently willful abuse and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be traumatic . . . [so that] the children’s subsequent emotional development has been profoundly and predominantly negatively affected” (p. 1). Further explaining this concept, Shengold (1989) writes, “soul murder is neither a diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term for circumstances that eventuate in crime–the deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another person” (p. 2, my emphasis). Isn’t the incessant policing and enforcement, either deliberately or unconsciously, by self and others, of the heteronormative mandate a widespread form of soul murder?
The queer body is constantly forced into life as overkill – this is the naturalization of antiqueerness that perpetuates violence that renders queerness inherently dead.
Stanley 2011 [Eric, “Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture,” Social Text 107 s Vol. 29, No. 2 s Summer 2011]
Overkill is a term used to indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. Overkill is often determined by the postmortem removal of body parts, as with the partial decapitation in the case of Lauryn Paige and the dissection of Rashawn Brazell. The temporality of violence, the biological time when the heart stops pushing and pulling blood, yet the killing is not finished, suggests the aim is not simply the end of a specific life, but the ending of all queer life. This is the time of queer death, when the utility of violence gives way to the pleasure in the other’s mortality. If queers, along with others, approximate nothing, then the task of ending, of killing, that which is nothing must go beyond normative times of life and death. In other words, if Lauryn was dead after the first few stab wounds to the throat, then what do the remaining fifty wounds signify? The legal theory that is offered to nullify the practice of overkill often functions under the name of the trans- or gay- panic defense. Both of these defense strategies argue that the murderer became so enraged after the “discovery” of either genitalia or someone’s sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from the threat of queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans- panic defense and received a four- year prison sentence after admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina transwoman, at least twenty times with a pair of scissors. Importantly, this defense is often used, as in the cases of Robles and Paige, after the murderer has engaged in some kind of sex with the victim. The logic of the trans- panic defense as an explanation for overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers us a way of understanding queers as the nothing of Mbembe’s query. Overkill names the technologies necessary to do away with that which is already gone. Queers then are the specters of life whose threat is so unimaginable that one is “forced,” not simply to murder, but to push them backward out of time, out of History, and into that which comes before.27 In thinking the overkill of Paige and Brazell, I return to Mbembe’s query, “But what does it mean to do violence to what is nothing?”28 This question in its elegant brutality repeats with each case I offer. By resituating this question in the positive, the “something” that is more often than not translated as the human is made to appear. Of interest here, the category of the human assumes generality, yet can only be activated through the specificity of historical and politically located intersections. To this end, the human, the “something” of this query, within the context of the liberal democracy, names rights- bearing subjects, or those who can stand as subjects before the law. The human, then, makes the nothing not only possible but necessary. Following this logic, the work of death, of the death that is already nothing, not quite human, binds the categorical (mis)recognition of humanity. The human, then, resides in the space of life and under the domain of rights, whereas the queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and the zone of death. As perpetual and axiomatic threat to the human, the queer is the negated double of the subject of liberal democracy. Understanding the nothing as the unavoidable shadow of the human serves to counter the arguments that suggest overkill and antiqueer violence at large are a pathological break and that the severe nature of these killings signals something extreme. In contrast, overkill is precisely not outside of, but is that which constitutes liberal democracy as such. Overkill then is the proper expression to the riddle of the queer nothingness. Put another way, the spectacular material- semiotics of overkill should not be read as (only) individual pathology; these vicious acts must indict the very social worlds of which they are ambassadors. Overkill is what it means, what it must mean, to do violence to what is nothing.