Securing the home: Gender, CCTV and the hybridized space of apartment buildings
| Published date | 01 February 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480614544210 |
| Date | 01 February 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
544210TCR0010.1177/1362480614544210Theoretical CriminologyWright et al.
research-article2014
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2015, Vol. 19(1) 95 –111
Securing the home: Gender,
© The Author(s) 2014
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CCTV and the hybridized
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480614544210
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space of apartment buildings
Jordana Wright
University of Toronto, Canada
Amanda Glasbeek
York University, Canada
Emily van der Meulen
Ryerson University, Canada
Abstract
This article explores gendered narratives of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in
apartment buildings. Drawing on primary data from a study with a diversity of women
in Toronto, Canada, the authors foreground women’s experiences with apartment
living and situate it as a profoundly feminized domestic arrangement. Consideration of
the workings of CCTV in apartment buildings troubles both security and surveillance
studies, especially in the context of the dominant legal and ideological configuration of
‘the home’. The apartment is at once ‘the home’ and neighbourhood; it is simultaneously
a private space that must be secured from external threats and a public space that
inhabitants have little power to secure.
Keywords
Apartment buildings, closed circuit television (CCTV), surveillance studies, Toronto,
women
Corresponding author:
Jordana Wright, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto, 14 Queen’s Park
Crescent West (Room 256), Toronto, Canada M5S 3K9.
Email: jordana.wright@utoronto.ca
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Theoretical Criminology 19(1)
[CCTV in my apartment building] doesn’t give anybody any justice. It doesn’t
help with any of the things that happen within that space … So it doesn’t
make me feel any more safe. It just frustrates the hell out of me because
at the end of the day, I can’t even feel safe in a space that is
supposed to make me feel safe.1
Despite the proliferation of studies about closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras as a
technological intervention into crime prevention and urban security, very little work has
focused exclusively on the use of such technologies in private living spaces, and even
less has focused on the specific domestic arrangements organized by apartment living.
This article seeks to address this gap, which we understand to result from several inter-
connected factors. First, the vast concentration of studies on CCTV has emphasized pub-
lic spaces and the close relationship between CCTV, neoliberal re-orderings of the city
and mass private property (Coleman and Sim, 2000; Fyfe and Bannister, 1996; McCahill,
2002; Norris, 2012; Wakefield, 2005). Second, there has been a general lack of systemic
attention to gender, and specifically to women’s experiences, in surveillance studies
(Ball et al., 2009; Koskela, 2012; Mason and Magnet, 2012), and the private space of the
home has traditionally been associated with women and/or femininity (Hayden, 1982;
Saegert, 1980; Sanger, 1995). Finally, those studies that have taken ‘the home’ as a space
to-be-secured, and especially those that focus on the home as ‘defensible space’ (Jacobs,
1993; Newman, 1973), tend to consider the home as a freehold tenure and/or as a self-
contained space in which the residents have a shared interest in protection from outsid-
ers.2 We argue that a specific focus on women’s experiences with CCTV in apartment
buildings challenges these general tendencies and complicates analyses of security and
personal safety, domestic living arrangements, and gender.
We situate the apartment building as a hybridized domestic space that works to
obscure traditional boundaries—between public and private, safe and unsafe, comfort
and risk—that have developed in relation to the material and discursive structure of ‘the
home’ that characterizes North American metropolitan areas. In the North American
context, and especially in Canada, where home ownership has been aggressively pur-
sued as a matter of government policy (Harris, 2004), apartment buildings offer a dis-
tinct entry point for considering the relations between surveillance, residential spaces
and gendered conceptions of security. Drawing on primary data from a study with
women in Toronto, Canada, we suggest that apartment buildings differ from single-
ownership homes in that they constitute surveillance as fluid rather than inward- or
outward-facing. This fluidity meant that the women in our study identified less as the
beneficiaries of the putatively protective functions of domestic security provisions and
more often as the objects of surveillance, unable to monitor and manage surveillance
technologies. As a result, they expressed mixed feelings about CCTV in their apartment
buildings. This ambivalence, we argue, is a reflection of the complex public and private
nature of their living spaces. It is clear that the women with whom we spoke do want to
feel safe in their living spaces and, to the extent that they see the watchers, or those with
control over CCTV, as having their interests at heart, they feel favourably towards
CCTV. At the same time, the issue of control is central to many women’s mistrust of
camera surveillance (Koskela, 2012). Unlike homeowners, for whom the installation
Wright et al.
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and management of CCTV cameras remains relatively seamless, for women living in
rental units in apartment buildings, this relationship cannot be assumed. As the quota-
tion that opens this article indicates, this lack of control most often leads to a sense of
frustration, injustice and, notably, insecurity.
As we will show, the findings from our study may resonate more widely as well. In
Toronto, apartment-living is a highly feminized experience: self-reported female-led
households make up 65.5 per cent of the private-sector buildings and 73 per cent of the
public-sector buildings in the city (United Way Toronto, 2011: 191). Moreover, given
CCTV’s broad claims to making watched spaces appear safer, and in the context of
women’s higher rates of expressed fears of crime, especially in or near their living spaces
(Brennan, 2011), the experiences documented here render visible broader issues.
Specifically, the implementation of CCTV in the hybridized spaces of apartment build-
ings lends itself to a feminist analysis of the relationship between private and public
space, gendered conceptions of security and surveillance technologies. Thus, we begin
by drawing on literature about the deployment of the surveillant gaze and its workings in
relation to strategies aimed at securitizing ‘the home’, before considering the specifici-
ties of the apartment building as ‘the home’ that is to-be-secured in the North American
context. The article then moves to a discussion of our study with women in Toronto and
their experiences with CCTV in their apartment buildings. Their experiences offer
important contributions to emerging understandings of the relationship between gender,
surveillance and urban security.
The surveillant gaze and the securitization of ‘the home’
Research on techniques of securing urban space through video surveillance tends to
focus on large commercial properties, such as malls and arenas, business parks and office
complexes, leisure parks and cultural centres, and the streets that surround them (Coleman
and Sim, 2000; McCahill, 2002; Norris, 2003). Perhaps given the focus on the signifi-
cance of CCTV for public space, considerably less research has been conducted on the
ways in which CCTV operates in relation to inhabited, domestic space. When the litera-
ture does consider the surveillance of ‘domestic’ space, the focus tends to be on the
securitization of the nation, rather than the securitization of the home (Abu-Laban and
Bakan, 2012; Hughes, 2012; Seamon, 2007–2008). For the purposes of this article, the
term ‘domestic’ will be used to address surveillance in relation to the home or the space
in which one lives. Issues regarding video surveillance around, on, and in multiple imag-
inaries of the home will be brought to the fore of our discussion. We begin our analysis
of the distinct constellations of power and referent objects that characterize the securiti-
zation of the home by considering the effects of domestic space on the surveillant gaze.
Surveillance serves the dual function of observation and management (Foucault,
1975; Young, 2014), both of which are facilitated through what phenomenologists have
termed ‘the gaze’ (Krips, 2010; Lacan, 1981; cf. Sartre, 2001 [1943]). ‘The gaze’
describes the relationships of power that circulate between the act of looking at and the
act of being looked at. While there is power in being looked at just as there is power in
looking (hooks, 1992), it is the watcher who tends to be placed at the centre of narratives
on the gaze. It is from the watcher’s point of view that we learn about those who enter
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Theoretical Criminology 19(1)
this relationship. With respect to strategies aimed at securitizing the home, the attention
of the watcher implicated in the gaze has been discussed as both inward-facing and out-
ward-facing, relative to living or dwelling space; their means of watching can be mecha-
nized or human, and their watch can be fixated upon objects or people (who are, at times,
objectified [Mulvey, 1975]).
The dominant theme to emerge from the literature on the workings of surveillance in
relation to the home has been the significance of non-technological, human surveillance
in which the...
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