Not Meant to Be Read: The Stories They Silence, the Resistance That Speaks
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. 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. 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.
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
City University of New York - Graduate Center
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