Not Meant to Be Read: The Stories They Silence, the Resistance That Speaks

<p>In this dissertation, I trace the evolution of surveillance from overt state violence to the more insidious forms of ideological policing embedded in everyday life. Through lived experience, oral history, and critical autoethnography, I explore how surveillance moves through bodies, families, institutions, and memory—not simply as external control, but as internalized rhythms of fear, vigilance, and self-surveillance. I move between my father's life under Romanian dictatorship, my own embodied inheritance, and the contemporary struggles of librarians facing ideological suppression to reveal surveillance as a structure that persists through generations, mutates across contexts, and demands new forms of resistance.</p> <p>I argue that collective care is not a soft antidote, but a radical and necessary refusal. Care is a strategic survival praxis: a way of refusing the atomization and fracture that surveillance demands. I offer a theorization of the membrane—a permeable, resilient site where trauma, memory, and resistance move, tangle, and sometimes transform. Built on Barad's (2007) theorization of quantum entanglement, I situate trauma not as a linear inheritance but as an entangled field, where harm and hope move simultaneously across time, space, and bodies, and where refusal becomes a generative act of survival.</p> <p>Throughout, I refuse simple binaries between victimhood and resistance, silence and voice. I sit with the dissonances—between survival and subjugation, between inherited fear and self-fashioned freedom—and insist that any attempt to dismantle surveillance must begin with reimagining relational accountability. I offer this work as a call to collective attunement: to build networks of care that resist ideological conformity, fragment isolation, and create possibilities for survival beyond the architectures of control.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

Year dc:date.available

2025

Author dc:creator

• Onea, Cristina

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michelle Fine

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Brett Stoudt
• Jason VanOra
• Emese Ilyés
• María Elena Torre

• Applied Ethics
• Critical and Cultural Studies
• Discourse and Text Linguistics
• Feminist Philosophy
• Gender and Sexuality
• Information Literacy
• Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Personality and Social Contexts
• Politics and Social Change
• Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies
• Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance
• Social Justice
• Social Policy
• Social Psychology
• Social Psychology and Interaction
• Theory and Philosophy
• Theory, Knowledge and Science
• Transpersonal Psychology
• Women's Studies
• Surveillance Studies
• Intergenerational Trauma
• Collective Care
• Librarianship
• Daughtering
• Resistance and Survival

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6317

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-7411