Abstract
Lesbian resistance to the policing of their multiple identities provides an important example of agency in the era of big data. Revisiting an earlier article about the lesbian gang Dykes Taking Over (DTO) as an example of lesbian resistance now 10 years later, this chapter presents their experiences with systems of control in school as tactics for resistance to the biopower inherent in these data regimes. As extensions of the panopticon and yet another expression of the carceral society (Foucault 1995, 2003), the experiences of DTO indicate that these data are used to control populations, not to liberate them. These themes are investigated in context of intersectionality, resistance to surveillance, bullying in schools, and the implications of data regimes operating as organizing forces in activist contexts. Arguing that the use of big data presents a critical dilemma where identities are verified and presented as a finite number of choices, communities such as the greater LGBT community will lose agency in self definition if they organize around these identities to the exclusion of others. Challenging the invisibility imposed on multiplicative being will be a necessary act so that self identification will not become a practical impossibility in this new future.
A portion of this chapter was originally published in Johnson (2007) and is reprinted here by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals. An earlier version of this chapter was presented as “Critical Dilemmas and Methodological Regimes: Toward a Genealogy of an Empirical Borderland” at the Foucault Society Symposium in New York City.
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Johnson, D.E. (2014). When They Tell You Who You Are: Lesbian Resistance to the Policing of Multiple Identities. In: Peterson, D., Panfil, V. (eds) Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9188-0_6
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