The impact is perpetual surveillance via the panopticon.

On June 26, 2003, consensual adult sodomy was decriminalized in the United States. While the ruling was understandably lauded by gay and lesbian civil rights activists, others were quick to caution against an easy acceptance of the terms of the decision. The legal scholar Nan Hunter, for example, argues that the Lawrence and Garner v. Texas decision (hereafter referred to as Lawrence-Garner) ‘‘performed a double move, creating a dramatic discursive moment.’’ A generative project of liberalism, the purportedly liberating process of deregulation inaugurates yet again the multiplication of pools of knowledge—particularization, minutiae, what Hunter terms ‘‘heightened scrutiny’’—of queer bodies.∞ This time, unlike sexology, psychiatry, and other fields embedded in the study of deviance, liberalism works through the positive register of incorporation (the productive e√ects of exclusion notwithstanding). Paradoxically, the decriminalization of sodomy results in accentuated state regulation of sexuality rather than a decline in such patrolling,≤ commissioning many other actors to intensify other types of scrutiny, for example, to assess the suitability of homosexuals for adoption and parenting. Hunter locates this heightened scrutiny as part of the subterranean ‘‘examination of the social acceptability of those persons who are the objects of the government’s interventions’’ specific to jurisprudence regarding sexuality. Highlighting the Foucauldian entanglement of freedom and intimate control, infinite detention 115 tion, Hunter argues that ‘‘deprived of criminal law as a tool, opponents of equality for lesbians and gay men are likely to concentrate increasingly on the strategy of containment.’’ She delineates several areas where containment tactics might be most precarious: disputes involving children, control over expressive space, otherwise known as the public sphere, and distinguishing the ‘‘respectability’’ of queer relationships that reinforce hierarchies of race, class, gender, and citizenship.≥ These points regarding containment are well taken, but other forms of power focus less on state regulation and the scrutiny of actors and instead foreground floating mechanisms of continuous control, enacted through the proliferation of management devices and details, an implosion and explosion of information about sexual subjects that subtends the emancipatory ideals of the liberal subject, straddling the disciplinary apparatus of the state and the more di√use registers of control societies. Disciplinary containment—discursive, ideological, and spatial—is still very much in operation as a panoptic power player even while new grains of information, indeed, information that was once only superfluous or seemingly superfluous to circuits of domination, feed the epistemological will-to-know of control societies: the dance between the ‘‘internalization of the gaze’’ and the ‘‘processes of administration, social sorting and simulation,’’ the latter dubbed ‘‘superpanopticism.’’∂ These tensions reflect an ongoing discussion about the uses of the panopticon as a surveillance model, whereby subjects are disciplined through regulations, and the ‘‘superpanopticon’’ of informational surveillance through which there is a regularization of population construction and the proliferation of ‘‘regularities.’’ For Foucault, normalization of society entails tendencies from ‘‘technologies of drilling’’ that are enacted in various institutional sites of confinement (hospitals, prisons, schools, barracks) to populations as they are produced through what he calls ‘‘technologies of security’’—insurance and reassurance—that work through the ‘‘regularization’’ of risk, profoundly di√erent from regulation and the regulatory modes invested in disciplinary sites. In his later work, Foucault contends that biopolitics shifts or even overrides the emphasis on disciplining subjects to the regularization of populations, with a ‘‘normalizing society’’ as the object and objective of both.∑ While regulatory power is maintained through the minimum amount of exertion to delineate internals and externals, ‘‘powers of exuberance’’ characterize the productive capacity of informational economies, fecund circuits that exponentially multiply through intersections, overlaps, matches, points of contact, coordinates, and contradictions. The focus is regenerative rather than retributive, producing more and more rather than mediating inclusion and exclusion. Thus, unlike power that banishes and excludes, or includes and organizes and manages, this power operates through calculation and intervention, characterized by tendencies and degrees, adjusted through tweaking and modulation rather than norming.∏ There is less emphasis on the outside or inside to regulate, less emphasis on ‘‘closed site[s] di√erentiated from . . . another closed site’’; instead, closed sites give way to ‘‘frightful continual training . . . continual monitoring.’’π Detailing the trajectories of the move ‘‘from disciplining to biopolitical control,’’ Patricia Clough argues that governance and representational politics, adapting to the ‘‘disorganization of nationally organized capital,’’ transit into expansive modalities of ‘‘risk management, militarism, and policing’’∫ that dislocate or slice through the imagined coherency of contained sites, identity categories (race, class, gender, sexuality, nation), and the body-as-organism: a tension between disciplinary normativization of subjects and their ‘‘behavioral expression of internalized social norms’’Ω and the social control of pools of bodies both human and nonhuman. Thus, the ‘‘new regime of heightened regulation of homosexuality’’ that Hunter speaks of must be understood in conjunction with, not separate from, profiling, surveillance, and information technologies currently in use.∞≠