The use of gendered surveillance has, thus far, been overlooked in conversations surrounding the operationalisation of the Contagious Diseases Acts. The language used throughout the legislation by Britain constructed all women as potential pollutants of men; as threats to the governance of the Empire’s White ruling class that had to be contained, controlled, and corralled into ‘docile’ bodies that adhered to the behaviours expected during the Victorian era. This research is a contextualised, comparative analysis of the Contagious Diseases Acts 1866-1869 in Ireland and the Indian Contagious Diseases Act 1868 in India. Based on a close reading of each country’s enacted legislation, this research thesis brings together surveillance studies, with queer, feminist, and critical race theory, to interrogate how poor-and working-class women, in both jurisdictions, were constructed by the colonial British State. In examining the legislation introduced across both Ireland and India, this research takes David Lyon’s definition of surveillance, along with his notion of social sorting, together with the work of Sherene Razack, Chandra Mohanty, and Scott Lauria Morgensen’s definition of heteropatriarchy, to interrogate the coalescing of intersectional systems of oppression, and to provide a nuanced understanding of the impact of the Contagious Diseases Acts on the women who worked under them. This research argues that the Contagious Diseases Acts represent a colonial governmentality; one that sought to exert the dominance of the British State through gendered surveillance and penal sanction. This research provides future researchers with the knowledge, and tools, necessary to interrogate the Contagious Diseases Acts through a multidisciplinary lens; one that incorporates legal, surveillant, feminist, and critical race spheres of thought, to deepen our understanding of how the law shaped Britain’s colonial project.