Abstract
The article unpacks the history and function of hypervisibility via surveillance mechanisms used to monitor and classify subjects within the criminal justice system, using social theories proposed by Michel Foucault and Allan Sekula; offers examples of digital media artists who experiment with techniques designed to evade bodily monitoring and surveillance; and discusses a digital media project with a group of adolescent girls in a juvenile arbitration program who video-recorded their slam poetry performances and then deliberately masked/obscured their bodily appearances while editing their videos. The authors argue that the girl participants’ media-making practices generated a liminal space of in/visibility that pushed back against their experience of criminalization and disrupted surveillance mechanisms that they encountered in their local schools, communities, and the juvenile arbitration program, while the participants openly spoke about their life issues and traumas.
