Wearable cameras, in-visible breasts: intimate spatialities of feminist research with wearable camcorders in Istanbul

Abstract

Video-based wearable technology such as actioncams and optical head mount devices lead to various kinds of visualities and interrelations between camera vision, bodily visibility, immersive viewing and public visibility of the body-wearing-the-camera. These interrelations are not neutral and in order to claim wearable visual technology's potential for critical, feminist research, it is essential to problematise the contexts and frictions that precede and/or surface during and after the bodily experience of shooting with a wearable device in a research context. In this article, I problematise the common approaches to video-based wearable research technology by engaging participants' particular ethical, emotional, political positions and embodiment of camera's prosthetic vision during mobile visual research in Istanbul. This work was realised as part of the ongoing study on memories of violence and wellbeing in Istanbul and the specific questions that guide my discussion are: what wearable camcorders as mobile research tool do to bodies; how they co-constitute the norms of visibility, movement and gender of particular bodies and what practices and emotional responses emerge from these intersections. A major aim, therefore, is to situate the camera experience as in physical and social relations of moving, seeing and be seen as gendered bodies in specific (research) settings. Drawing on ‘the embodied nature of all vision’, the article provides a close-up, chest-specific analysis of the implications of doing wearable visual research and presents breast-space as an emergent research site in my Istanbul study.

Keywords:

• Embodied methods
• feminist objectivity
• Istanbul
• situated knowledges
• visual research ethics
• wearable technology

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank both reviewers for their detailed and constructive feedback on this work. I am also grateful to Gillian Rose for her insights and comments on the initial draft. I am indebted to Murat Buyukcoskun for his encouragement, support, and the extra parental work he had to undertake when I was physically and/or mentally absent travelling, writing, revising this project. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement VISMEM No 707406.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Aslı Duru is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford UK. Her research interests include mobile visual and walking methods to explore the intersections between urban environments, feminism, inclusion/exclusion.