From Watchtowers to Screens: Power, Exclusion, and the Surveillance of Disabled Lives
摘要
This chapter traces how the organisation of power has shifted from the disciplinary watchtowers of solid modernity to the diffuse, screen-mediated surveillance of liquid modern times, and how these transformations have reshaped the exclusion of disabled people. It considers the movement from a society of producers—regulated through a biopolitics of health, productivity, and institutional oversight—to a consumerist order where identity, value, and belonging are increasingly calibrated via market participation and ideals of fitness. In this new configuration, disabled people encounter both the residues of solid modernity’s classificatory, medicalising frameworks, and the pressures of liquid modernity’s synoptic gaze, where media spectacle, optimisation culture, and competitive individualism recast exclusion through subtler but pervasive mechanisms. Through this analysis, the chapter argues that in our liquid modern times there has been an intensification of the precariousness of disabled people’s lives.