In this era rife with neoliberal economics and systemic inequality, cultural voyeurism prevails as both a contentious and acute issue in the context of academia and art and corporate appropriation.
Cultural voyeurism is a "deliberate, recurrent, and proactive effort to acquire information about another culture or cultural phenomenon, sometimes from a distance and sometimes as a participant observer," as defined by Ohio State University communication professor Osei Appiah in a 2018 article published by Oxford University Press.
But the use of voyeurism, or the practice of obtaining sexual gratification from observing others, in describing this type of cross-cultural exchange denotes a subtext of objectification and imbalance of socioeconomic clout.
H. L. T. Quan, an associate professor at ASU's School of Social Transformation, said in her college years, as she and her peers of color began posing questions regarding racial formation, power relations and the possessive investment in whiteness, they were stifled from conducting meaningful inquisition by the white, male uniformity of political science.
"That also shows up in epistemology and methodology," Quan said. "And so as many of us of that generation (began) to raise hard questions about knowledge and power, to use Foucault's term, we (had) to look elsewhere. There was not a home for us."
In reaction to the homogeneity in political science, Quan and her like-minded peers looked to feminist studies and ethnic studies, particularly Black and Latinx studies, which she said are preeminent in a range of fields.
"Of architecture and arts, to synthetic biology and zoology, and in between we have mathematics and political science and geography and economics, the ethnic studies, and particularly Black studies, have been at the forefront of raising some of the most complex and critical questions about power, about government and about citizenship and belonging," Quan said.
Fields like Black studies have "deep and intimate ties to the historical struggles against anti-Black violence, against white supremacy and for liberation," Quan said, which in turn has fostered innate investments in social justice.
"For Black Americans, Black cultural production is a sign of resistance," said Rashad Shabazz, an associate professor in the School of Social Transformation and author of "Spatializing Blackness." "It's a sign of giving voice to a politics, an identity, a history."
Cultural voyeurism in the context of Black studies "can be an articulation of white privilege" insofar as the non-Black voyeur being permitted to engage and disengage freely and flippantly, "whereas for Black people, there is no stepping away," Shabazz said.
"We are always within that cultural milieu whether we choose it or not," he said. "And so, again, that voyeurism is about power, it's about privilege. And I don't know if there's a way to be a cultural voyeur... (and) not reinscribe that power asymmetry."
In addition to teaching as an associate professor, Quan, along with ASU's C.A. Griffith — associate professor in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre — is a co-founder of QUAD Productions, a not-for-profit production company that has produced a range of documentary films, most notably an award-winning piece on conversations between Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama.
Sam Ellefson is the Editor of State Press Magazine, leading a team of writers, editors and designers in creating four print issues each semester. Sam is a senior getting dual degrees in journalism and film studies and is pursuing an accelerated master's in mass communication at ASU.
