Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2025, 26 (1): 110-126 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2025.008

Let’s Play Surveillance: The Panoptic Affect of Talking Dolls in the Domestic Sphere

AJ Castle ORCID...
Stony Brook University

Studies of the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and surveillance have increased in the past ten years. I am overall wondering what we fear and feel about AI and surveillance? Yet, fears and feelings are complicated research questions. To address those complications and contribute an affective analysis to existing research on surveillance, I analyse two horror films – Child’s Play (Klevberg 2019) and M3GAN (Johnstone 2023) – that directly criticise the relationship between mothering, surveillance, and panoptic control. Child’s Play and M3GAN are also important cultural productions for exploring panoptic affects in the home because they visualise collective and organised emotions. Ultimately, they warn us of the dangers of incorporating uncontrolled artificial intelligence technologies into the home and insist that mother figures and children must work together to address that specific danger of artificial intelligence that continues to linger in both obvious and inconspicuous technologies. Reading these films for a specific look or gaze, I argue that the home is panoptic and that panoptic affect denotes a specific feeling of being watched and of also not knowing who is doing the watching. I also argue that seeing through film has important functions in identifying, addressing, and maintaining asymmetries of power.

Keywords: talking dolls, panopticon, panoptic affect, gaze

Received: October 18, 2024; Revised: June 23, 2025; Accepted: June 30, 2025; Prepublished online: August 27, 2025; Published: August 31, 2025  Show citation

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Castle, AJ. 2025. "Let’s Play Surveillance: The Panoptic Affect of Talking Dolls in the Domestic Sphere." Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 26(1):110-126.
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