Dr. Pressman (Bookishness) and Walter Benjamin (“Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting”, trans. Harry Zohn) each describe the fetishism of book ownership, in which symbolic value is attached to the book. I am considering the symbolic value of the book (and the bookish body) in the context of surveillance culture, and in particular relation to my research on sexual violence in fandom convention spaces. I use this post as an opportunity to connect some dots between this week’s bookish readings and my research, as I am presenting it at a conference in a few days.

Benjamin writes that, “for a collector, . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects” (67). “Ownership” as intimacy suggests a close spatial proximity between that which is collected and she who collects, a “nearness” which Dr. Pressman shows is remediated through digital book imagery (Bookishness 10, 35). Following Susan Sontag’s situation of U.S. photography traditions in the colonial pursuit of collecting (On Photography), I consider the practice of (often nonconsensual) convention photography to be a means of “collecting” bodies as datified archival “objects.” By this I mean that the nonconsensual photo documents not only the proximal relationship between the bodies of photographer and photographed subject, but also the photographer’s greater liberty to determine this proximity/nearness through the functions of camera technology. Where the body cannot be literally sexually possessed, the body can be remediated into a collectable visual representation of (forced, coerced, or consensual) compliance with being objectified through the act of being photographed.

For convention culture, this means that the visual archive of the convention overwrites the lived experiences which occur around and beyond the moment of photography / compliance / archival. I am using the convention archive as an entry-point into a larger argument about how surveillance and the “collection” of body-data shapes pop culture practices more broadly. As a class, we have found that the book is a body, and that the body is a book. To build from Nick Couldry’s framework in Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (2003), I want to show how rituals of collecting and archiving serve to “categorize” each body as book or as reader – object or subject – and “naturalize” the book/body as representative of this power relationship. The book and the body are encoded with symbolic value. Dr. Pressman describes the use of the book as a status symbol in the U.S., where reading inherits historic conscription to that position which is “Western, Judeo-Christian, middle class or at least instilled with ideals of bourgeois mobility” (Bookishness 32). This status of reader/archiver is exclusive: the reader is made dominant by their potential to be able to read (they do not necessarily need to read, though this practice would do the ritual work of naturalizing inequality).

Dr. Amira Jarmakani’s Digital and Networked Feminisms course has been a rich complement to our Books class this semester, as each course has offered perspectives on these symbolic and political powers which networked actors produce. Readings on dataveillance have led me to consider the ways in which archival and “collection” practices necessarily datify identities and bodies, producing boundaries and value through containment. When used as a tool (to borrow Amber Rahman’s term) to reinforce violent institutional relationships, archival technologies might also act as technologies of surveillance. Birth certificates, state identification documents, and police drone footage – each what Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah (2015) call a “surveillance apparatus” –archive individuals as data units in value-encoded systems (“Legally Sexed: Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens” 60). The “intimacy” or “thereness” of book collection is perhaps violently remediated through these surveillance practices, which datify people into readable data units that can be ‘opened’ for interrogation at any time. Surveillance is a violent form of archival and meaning production which can be understood as an extension of colonial reading and bookishness.

Benjamin describes that “[t]he most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them” (60). This containment takes on a grim cadence when we consider the collector as a colonial amasser and the archived “individual items” as humans. Jean-Christophe Cloutier more succinctly criticizes this colonial archival framework by critiquing the language of “capture” (Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature 7). My research is also moving towards grappling with collection as an extension of colonialism and surveillance (each key to collection’s obvious grounding in capitalism).

This leads me to my final project for our class, which will mediate the erasure of personhood that is produced when bodies are collected or captured through the colonial “surveillance apparatus” of the medical record. I am deliberating if my project will suggest resistance more obviously, or if its existence will itself serve as critique. Either way, I am inspired by the postcolonial archival critiques which Marlene Manoff describes in “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines”, where creators “reinterpret and recontextualize [colonial archival] information and thus call into question the colonial version of events” (16). I hope that my work on surveillance and sexual violence in the convention space can open up these conversations on the politics of materiality in fandom and pop culture studies more broadly.