Conclusion Confronting Visuality in the Digital Age

Abstract

What emerges from examining women writers’ engagement with issues of visuality is the need for contemporary audiences to possess a nuanced, critical media literacy. In order to be the type of literate person who can effectively engage contemporary media, the writers indicate that viewers must be able to connect what is depicted in the media to larger ideologies about race, gender, and sexuality. But perhaps even more important, viewers must be able to see what is not visualized, since important issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class remain hidden. However, though the writers stress the importance of seeing what is not visualized, they do not suggest that this is an easy task. In fact, if the accounts included in Confronting Visuality are not enough, the history of feminist media studies itself testifies to the challenge of recognizing what has not been visualized. This is evident, for example, in early models of spectatorship that did not take into account differences between women based on race and sexuality. As bell hooks asked incredulously in 1992, “Are we really to imagine that feminist theorists writing only about the image of white women, who subsume this specific historical subject under the totalizing category ‘woman,’ do not ‘see’ the whiteness of that image?” (Black Looks 124). While hooks attributed this oversight to the psychoanalytic bases of feminist film theory at the time, E. Ann Kaplan suggests that it is due more to the “powerful shaping force of the history of imaging,” writing, “The inability to ‘see’ the racism in the films we were studying in relation to structures of the male gaze testifies to how looking is socially constructed: we had grown up with such images, regardless of our actual relations with people of other ethnicities, and thus could not see what was under our very eyes” (Looking 127).