“Mothers live inside a double gaze: watching and being watched”

After becoming a mother, Sophie Hamacher grew curious. How did other mothers experience being constantly observed – by the state, corporations, their communities, and even themselves? This question became the seed for the book Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance^[1], a five-year collaboration between the artists Hamacher and Jessica Hankey (who is also the publisher of Orbis Editions), along with 48 contributors.

In conversation with Hannah Rothschild from the Van Leer Foundation, they share their insights into how the growing web of data collection and the rapid rise of AI have their eyes on the most intimate space of all – family life.

What prompted you to explore motherhood and surveillance, and how did this idea become a book?

Sophie Hamacher: When I became a mother, I started questioning how my perspective of others and their perspective of me changed. As an artist, photography has always involved a very concentrated looking for me. Once my first child was born I kept getting distracted looking through the camera’s viewfinder because I had to watch my child instead of focusing on composition. I started thinking about baby monitors and their link to photography’s origins in military research.

I was curious to learn how these devices, marketed to ease anxiety, actually help produce it. So I started using the baby monitor as a kind of film camera, capturing everything but the baby. I experimented with the images they made.

The book came about by asking what it means to look, watch, and be watched. What kinds of looking are acts of care, and what kinds become acts of control? How do we tell the difference? I reached out to Jessica, and we began to invite different mothers to answer these questions.

Jessica Hankey: Our book Supervision looks at how mothers and families are watched in unequal ways. How heightened scrutiny is influenced by class, race, immigration status, sexuality and religion. The book brings together contributors from across disciplines – from artists and poets to legal scholars and activists.

How did you connect with contributors? Why was it important to approach this subject through multiple voices, mediums and perspectives?

Jessica Hankey: We reached out to people we’d never met, across different fields and continents. This project is grounded in our belief that the siloing of disciplines separately from each other inhibits important conversations and cross-disciplinary learning.

Many of the contributors write or make visual work using their own experience as part of their analysis. Sophie spoke with 14 of the contributors for the book, so those conversations became part of its structure.

Sophie Hamacher: Mothers live inside a double gaze: they are watching and being watched. So much of this project came out of being isolated as a new mother and needing community. I wanted to talk to others to see how they were negotiating being seen, judged and cared for in that role.

Your work suggests that parents, especially mothers, are being closely surveilled. Who is watching and why?

Sophie Hamacher: Overlapping observation systems – governments, healthcare providers, tech corporations, and parents themselves – are watching. Since our book came out in 2023, this has increased. Governments and state institutions often claim they are watching under the banner of care or protection.

Initially, it seems positive that medical systems closely monitor the pregnant and postpartum body. However, when you look closer, that monitoring sits within a long history of racial, class, and gender bias – of how bodies are valued and treated.

Social media also invite a kind of self-surveillance because parents who post about their children curate moments of care and intimacy for the public gaze. And then there’s all the home technology – baby monitors, tracking apps, wearables – that are watching too.

Jessica Hankey: What’s really striking to me is how closely corporate surveillance and state surveillance have started working together. In this data economy, pregnant women and mothers are targeted as extremely high-value consumers. Pregnancy starts a wave of spending on new products and services, and new parents are particularly susceptible to advertising that stokes their anxiety. Mothers are gatekeepers to children entering data systems before they can speak. That corporate focus connects with state interests in monitoring and managing mothers as a way to shape the future population itself.

Corporate data now feeds state surveillance and criminalisation. After federal abortion protections ended in 2022, pregnancy-related behaviours were rapidly reclassified as crimes. That same year, Facebook gave police private messages between a Nebraska mother and daughter about abortion pills, evidence used to sentence the mother to two years in prison.^[2][3] The same logic governs immigration enforcement. New interpretations of immigration law have made visa and green-card holders vulnerable to deportation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) buys commercial app data and uses cell-tower simulators to track phones, and quasi-military raids are producing a climate of fear that limits families’ access to work, school, and medical care.^[4][5][6][7]

How does the surveillance culture shape mothers’ behaviour, care and self-perception?

Sophie Hamacher: The definition of surveillance is close observation, but its meaning varies across languages. In French, surveiller un enfant carries a sense of care, while in English it feels ominous, tied to control. In German, überwachen implies hierarchy or watching from above. These nuances helped me see how looking and caring can so easily slip into monitoring and power. When I began interviewing people, I often asked whether surveillance could ever feel like care, or whether parents “surveil” their own children. Contributors like Melina Abdullah immediately rejected that framing. She emphasised that the bond between mother and child is nothing like the state’s gaze, and that for Black communities – especially Black activists – it’s important to reserve the concept of surveillance to describe these operations of power by entities external to the family, like the police and even social services.

Mothers are often told that good care means careful tracking, that being vigilant is a form of responsibility. Examples include the feeding chart or sleep apps. In Supervision, artist Gemma Anderson transforms her twins’ breastfeeding chart into a patterned record of every feed, while visual artist Laura Fong Prosper’s GoPro-shot video MATER shows that the home economy runs on the full-time, multitasked labour of mothers – work that is essential yet systematically devalued. Mothers are watching themselves also through the imagined gaze of others: the doctor, the teacher, the online community … so it is an internal and external practice – a reason why it all becomes so entangled.

Why is this a conversation that parents, policymakers, and society at large need to pay attention to? What kinds of rights and protections do you think are most urgently needed?

Jessica Hankey: Protecting the data of children and families – particularly health and educational data – requires government-level reforms and institutional-level accountability. I hesitate to suggest individual solutions because when mothers are urged to shield their children individually rather than press for collective safeguards, we see a privatisation of risk and moral pressure on parents instead of accountability for institutions. In the USA we have laws to protect the data of children (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) and we need equivalent laws to protect adults. If we look at how frequently tech companies have surveilled children in the USA, it demonstrates how routinely they ignore the law. Google has been fined repeatedly for illegally collecting children’s data, in 2019 and again in 2025.^[8] They deny wrongdoing but have settled for upwards of USD 180 million.

Artificial intelligence now promises to make total surveillance possible because it can combine and process enormous amounts of data across every part of life: phones, biometrics, online activity. Tech companies in the USA justify it as an “arms race” with China. But we can’t acquiesce to their demand for unfettered development. We need preventive regulations on AI. Safeguarding privacy for children, for mothers, for everyone is going to be an ongoing fight.

Sophie Hamacher: I agree with Jessica. The data ecosystem could be far more transparent, which would make a real difference. Instead, it’s kept hidden by design. That’s why naming who watches mothers – and why – feels urgent. But what feels just as significant is how that data is turned into prediction and prescription, quietly shaping behaviour and expectation. That’s where surveillance becomes intimate.

People need to pay attention because this book invites us to rethink how care is organised, moving beyond the nuclear family towards other ways of living and mothering. The collectivist models described by contributors give me hope. From the writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs, I learned about the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers in Brooklyn in the 1980s. They redefined the “Black single mother” – not as a problem to be managed by the state or community, but as a collective of experts in care. They transformed isolation into mutual support, turning mothering into a shared practice.