The Ends of Visibility

Abstract

Following an introduction to the field of visual culture studies and the idea of revisualising intersectionality, Haschemi Yekani draws on different forms of media use, artistic practice, and everyday visual culture to problematise notions of difference that rely on a binary of invisibility and visibility. Haschemi Yekani argues that the question of in/visibility needs to go beyond superficially diverse representation and also concerns technological development and a reflection of how media operate within global postcolonial networks of capital. Via discussions of “colour blindness” and “bathroom panic”, the chapter reflects the potential of artistic practice to contribute to a queering and transing of identification and the image repertoire. This includes post-representational artistic practice, strategies of disidentification as well as forms of refusing representation altogether.

Visual Culture and Intersectionality

Perceptions of visual difference and similarity are not always straightforward, and we must not confuse the mere presence of something with its visibility. As Magdalena Nowicka explains in greater detail in Chap. 2 in which she asks where difference begins, to understand perceptibility, we need to engage with the process of foregrounding certain aspects while delegating others to the background, that is, the constant (and necessary) filtering mechanisms we employ to make sense of our surroundings. In this context, Nowicka introduces the work of Eviatar Zerubavel who uses “visibility and invisibility as metaphors for relevance and irrelevance” (2015: 6) and draws our attention to the famous ambiguous example of Rubin’s Vase emblematising the “figure-and-ground model” in which viewers can recognise two different shapes in the same image but not simultaneously. When looking at pictures of this kind, “We can thus perceive either the vase or the faces, but not both of them at once, together” (Zerubavel 2015: 16). However, as Zerubavel himself concedes, the relationship between remarkability and unremarkability, what is noticed and what is not, is already implicated within cultural norms and power dynamics. To make this point, he briefly mentions the construction of Blackness in the US context, as the “visibility” of African ancestry, as opposed to the unremarkable absence of such ancestry when it comes to the constructions of whiteness (2015: 23). In the introduction to this volume, we also highlight that the realm of visual culture, and specifically artistic image production, can be disruptive to visually naturalised forms of social inequality. When we discussed the Rubin Vase example during one of our transdisciplinary workshops that preceded this publication, I was immediately reminded of the work of US-American artist Kara Walker who is famous for her adaptation of the silhouette which likewise utilises stark black and white contrasts. These black cut-out figures against a white background became popular as “shadow portraits” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and were often associated with women’s handicraft. The term “shadow portrait” highlights that the depicted faces were the black shadow of a supposedly white counterfeit. Walker recontextualises this technique by depicting the disturbing realities of sexualised violence but also sexual agency in grotesque figures. Reproducing crass contrasts between the racialised carnality of the systematic abuse of Black bodies, especially female bodies, under chattel slavery, Walker renders visible the brutality of enslavement that the supposedly genteel planter class engaged in and conveniently overlooked as the shadowy background that still haunts contemporary society and which Christina Sharpe describes as “monstrous intimacies” (2010: 153–187). The visible two-dimensional blackness of the shadow is linked to the complex embodied experience of racialisation and demonstrates that race is both inextricably tied to visibility and yet exceeds the realm of the visual. The supposed physiognomic markers of race are exaggerated in the figures and the visual representation of “colour” is flattened to the binary of the black paper against a white background which lacks a “real” referent. We can distinguish white from Black figures in her installation despite both being represented in the black cut-out (and there are also inverted versions of white cut-outs against a black background). Accordingly, the spectacle of racialised violence is immediately graspable in these depictions, precisely because the artworks adapt the crude mechanisms of the racist binary sorting and segregation of people. Engaging with this aesthetic technique, film scholar Alessandra Raengo describes Walker’s practice as follows:

while the shadow is a fleeting indexical sign, because it requires the presence of the body that produces it, the silhouette is its human-made, durable reproduction and as such survives the body’s departure. In the silhouette the body has fully vacated the sign—dissolved in the abstract iconicity of its contour—and has left behind a blackness, which is held as the trace of its past presence and current absence. (Raengo 2016: online)

As a shape, blackness is both linked to the representation of the body and abstracted from it—our ability to see, to understand the intersectional and historically as well as geographically distinct meanings of visually encoded racialised difference is both superficial and phenomenological, it is linked to how the cultural image repertoire¹ impacts lived experiences, or, again in Raengo’s vocabulary of film analysis, through Walker’s artwork, we can understand Blackness as “the meeting point between the screen and the skin” (Raengo 2016: online).

While visuality cannot be reduced to individual perception, it is, of course, interrelated with both vision and embodiment. Visuality is reliant on perception as a social and cognitive process but conversely also affects how difference is individually comprehended and socially communicated (Obasogie 2014: 50; Dikovitskaya 2005: 9, cf. also Chap. 2). Accordingly, when we talk about visuality and the perception of sameness/difference in this book, we do not mean to evoke the alleged visual evidentiality of Western ocular-centrism or objectivity,² and it is important to note that sight is not the only sensorial sphere through which difference and sameness are perceived or experienced. But while our project might risk an over-emphasis on vision at the expense of other senses, we also believe that social recognition is tied to a privileged role of visual representation. Western knowledge production but also emancipatory political projects have strongly relied on metaphors of seeing as recognition. In this way, visuality is immediately sutured to questions of visibility as representation. However, as Johanna Schaffer (2008) emphasises, we should not simply confuse more visibility with social recognition and not prematurely equate visuality and visibility. To clarify some of these distinctions, it is helpful to retrace how these terms originated and continue to be critically interrogated in the academic field of visual culture studies.

The beginning of what is now known as visual culture (studies) emerged from the wish to infuse traditional methodologies of art history with a post-foundational critique that set out to challenge “the figure of the observer who is nominally a free sovereign” (Crary 1988: 33) and gained prominence more widely in the 1990s. Hal Foster introduces visuality as a term that, while not in binary opposition to the physiological notion of vision, does refer to the ways in which scopic regimes³ are shaped by historical power relations. He writes,

Although vision suggests sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social fact, the two are not opposed as nature to culture: vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves the body and the psyche. Yet neither are they identical: here, the difference between the terms signals a difference within the visual—between the mechanism of sight and its historical techniques, between the datum of vision and its discursive determinations—a difference, many differences, among how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein. With its own rhetoric and representations, each scopic regime seeks to close out these differences: to make of its many social visualities one essential vision, or to order them in a natural hierarchy of sight. (Foster 1988: ix)

Correspondingly, visual culture studies explores how socio-cultural visuality is translated into (hierarchical) visibility and what is sometimes referred to as the cultural grammar of vision (cf. Brighenti 2010: 23).⁴ Resulting from this interest in the links between aesthetics, media, and power dynamics, visual culture further took its cues from studies on the so-called male gaze in narrative cinema (Mulvey 1989) and the racialised “spectacle of the ‘Other’” in mass media (Hall 1997). It is therefore not a coincidence that many of the foundational works in visual culture studies discuss the representation of women and racialised minorities.⁵ In this framework, visuality describes the historical/cultural signifying practices by which meanings are visually communicated and which are themselves implicated in how media operate. Accordingly, the concept of visuality is concerned with how the representation of bodies and the concomitant construction of identities and groups inform the circulation of images within networks that are shaped by hierarchical power relations.⁶

In his study on Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research Andrea Mubi Brighenti further elaborates on the distinction between visuality and visibility and on how vision and epistemology are intertwined in various disciplines. Brighenti offers a much more systematic overview of how these terms are used in various academic contexts than I am capable of here. He defines “visibility as a phenomenon that is inherently ambiguous, highly dependent upon contexts and complex social, technical and political arrangements which could be termed ‘regimes’ of visibility” (Brighenti 2010: 3). In this understanding, visuality is framed broadly as “the cultural counterpart of the sense of sight” and visibility is proposed to denote “a dimension of the social at large, unrestricted to the visual domain” (Brighenti 2010: 3, 4). Social visibility is therefore reliant on, but also exceeds the realm of visual representation. This notion of visibility is also relevant for our efforts to revis(ualis)e intersectionality as it corresponds to an interest in the social effects of visual perception and the manner in which these are intertwined with the cultural image repertoire. To put it differently, technology, media, and vision can be understood as different (but interlinked) spheres that impact the microlevel of individual perceptions of sameness and difference as well as the macrolevel of systemic distinctions that give rise to social inequalities.

While we criticise certain aspects of how visual representation and recognition are sometimes conflated, we are, as mentioned in the introduction (cf. Chap. 1), certainly not invested in a banal unseeing of difference—quite the opposite. Part of intersectional thinking is an awareness of the social effects of perceptions of difference to achieve a more equitable and just society by tackling perceptual biases and overcoming structural discriminations. Such forms of marginalisation are often experienced precisely as the unacknowledging or even unintelligibility⁷ of specific needs or lacking (political) representation, which cannot be reduced to, but includes the circulation of images in the media. W.J.T. Mitchell, who coined the term “the pictorial turn”, problematises the interrelations between images, objects, and media and describes pictures themselves as “complex assemblages of virtual, material and symbolic elements” (2005: xiiv). Hence, the idea of “positive images” to counter discrimination fails to adequately capture the intricacy of how visual representation and social visibility are connected. This correlation cannot be reduced to a linear model of representation automatically begetting greater inclusivity or diversity. To bring into conversation the fields of intersectionality research and visual culture then, we need to be aware of the complexities of how images operate and how they might influence the tenuous relationship of categorisation and identification.

To combine insights from these different fields implies a certain scepticism of the usefulness of identity and fixed categories as analytical lenses. Instead, this approach requires a more pronounced focus on affects and relationalities whilst maintaining a sustained intersectional critique of power relations and the material effects these have on individuals and groups. For this purpose, seeing itself (rather than the more stable notion of representation) needs to be politicised. We wish to disrupt the idea that to see is already to know and rather understand seeing itself as a creative practice. The visual sphere offers numerous ways to aesthetically challenge viewing conventions in artistic practice,⁸ but it also influences mundane affective interactions, including, of course, powerful modes of surveillance⁹ and exclusion that are ingrained, for example, in social media. In the context of surveillance and digital media, recognition is no longer (or not only) an act of bestowing social acknowledgement but necessarily bound up with “coarse social sorting according to visible somatic features” (Brighenti 2010: 164). This supposed visual evidentiality of (binary) difference (re)emerges from a history of violence that has shaped colonialist knowledge production based on sorting people into racialised categories. As Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, “order involves a formulation of difference that centres visibility and presupposes and reproduces vertical and horizontal un/equality” (Silva 2011: 142). Therefore, we need to ask how one can combine a postcolonial/decolonial critique of (visual) categorisation that is prevalent in critical visuality studies with intersectionality’s interest in social justice.

Part of the problem of visuality in relation to discrimination is that there is frequently a convergence of “invisibility” (as a lack of political representation) and “hypervisibility” (as being especially vulnerable to forms of violence or discriminatory policies). This dilemma has become more and more apparent, for instance, in the simultaneity of greater trans visibility in the media and the ongoing violence against trans people that is aggravated by intersectional forms of discrimination, such as racism, harassment at the workplace/economic precarity, access to health care, and/or legal status.¹⁰ Emphasising relationality as part of intersectionality Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, effectively propose to think of intersectionality not as an “either/or binary thinking” but as a “both/and frame” (2016: 27). It is not helpful to discern individual aspects of discrimination but to comprehend anti-trans violence as resulting from and being intensified by the very ways in which these various modes of oppression are already entangled. In the context of intersectionality research, the reference to identities and groups appears to be an obvious starting point. But we should also factor in that there are ways in which the failure to be legible within identity categories is often the very result of intersectional discrimination. Not only are trans women of colour, as mentioned, precariously situated within normative gender orders, Black cis women are also frequently perceived as “ungendered” or less feminine.¹¹ In this case, sexism and racism do not simply “intersect” within the visual metaphor; indeed, normative notions of femininity are already informed by whiteness, heteronormativity, and perceptions of able-bodiedness in ways that exclude certain bodies from the category of “woman” to begin with. This, once more, is not to dismiss the usefulness of a relational intersectional description of these processes of discrimination, but it obliges us to find other vocabularies of analytical description. Simply treating distinct categories such as gender, race, and class as self-evident overlooks the fact that these categories are a result of the processes of racism and sexism, and not their origin. The sphere of the visual proves vital in understanding how these terms acquire meaning and, accordingly, we should not reduce the question of visuality to a form of mimetic political representation.

In this spirit, the term “revis(ualis)ing”—in its double meaning of revising and visualising—is used here as a heuristic tool to describe modes of seeing differently, as an attempt to intervene into normative visual orders and as a productive revision of intersectional analytics. To return once more to the issue of anti-trans violence: Trans activists and artists, whose work I will discuss in more detail later in the chapter, are adamant that a form of liberal inclusion into the codes of mainstream media representation does not automatically result in greater freedoms for trans people. Instead, what is required is a more fundamental intervention into the functioning of intelligibility, which is also linked to the idea of transing (cf. Stryker et al. 2008) the image repertoire. Much like an understanding of reading and writing as a form of storytelling that disrupts notions of scientific objectivity (Haraway 1989: 15; Hartman 2008), we should be open to more speculative ways of exploring visual representations of sameness and difference. The very term “speculation” disrupts the supposedly evidentiary relation between seeing and knowing.¹² It was initially used to describe the visual observation of the stars, but speculation also refers to reasoning that is open to surprise.¹³ Revis(ualis)ing implies such an openness in challenging the terms of analysis that we employ in intersectionality research.

Having introduced both visual culture studies and the proposal to link this field more explicitly to questions of intersectionality via the heuristic tool of “revis(ualis)ing”, in the following sections, I discuss the work of critics from various disciplinary backgrounds and relate their insights to shorter vignettes drawing on different forms of media use, artistic practice, but also everyday visual culture. First, I problematise notions of difference that rely on a binary of invisibility and visibility, as seeing too little and seeing too much. I begin this section with a discussion of “colour blindness”—which is still sometimes presented as a naïve version of overcoming racial discrimination—by referencing the work of Osagie K. Obasogie with visually impaired and sighted individuals but also considering proposals for “colour -blind” casting. Subsequently, I address how this “blindness” towards difference can result in oversights in how digital media are conceptualised and continue to operate. I argue that the question of in/visibility needs to go beyond the surface of how we interact ever more intimately with digital media and also concerns technological development and a reflection of how these media function within global postcolonial networks of capital. Visual culture to a certain extent limits our imaginaries and is often complicit in forms of devaluing Others. To challenge such existing intersecting power imbalances necessitates a disruption of habitual ways of seeing at the level of looking at images and our identification with them but also at the level of producing different visual codes to begin with. Therefore, in section “Other Modes of Seeing, Other Modes of Being” of the chapter, I discuss post-representational artistic practice and “other modes of seeing” that contribute to a queering and transing of identification and the image repertoire as well as forms of refusing representation altogether. In this context I consider how visuality exceeds the realm of media representation and requires an interrogation of other “modes of being”¹⁴ as well. For this purpose, I turn to the debates around a trans “bathroom panic” and questions of accessibility in the public sphere. In including such varied examples from visual culture, I hope to demonstrate the transdisciplinary potential of a revis(ualis)ing of intersectionality.

Seeing Too Little, Seeing Too Much

While revis(ualis)ing intersectionality, as mentioned, implies a certain scepticism towards visual evidentiality, it is not to be confused with an unseeing of difference, especially when this is invoked as a supposedly open-minded form of “colour blindness”. To avoid what critics like Georgina Kleege (2012: 338) characterise as ableist references to blindness as “a prop for theories of consciousness”, in which blindness is time and again evoked within philosophical thought experiments without engaging with the lived experience of blind people, it is important to seriously consider the actual modes of perception of those who have limited or no vision. Kleege is adamant that it is not helpful to insist on a binary opposition of blindness and sight, as congenital blindness is, in fact, quite rare among blind individuals. She argues, “It is clearly more useful to think in terms of a spectrum of variation in visual acuity, as well as a spectrum of variation in terms of visual awareness or skill” (2012: 345). This distinction is relevant because the term “blindness” is frequently evoked to denote a version of an imaginary naïve innocence. From the perspective of intersectionality studies, Osagie K. Obasogie’s book Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind is especially instructive. In this study, he debunks notions of racism as based on “skin-deep” visual differences and calls for an “empirical Critical Race Theory” that engages with the ocular-centrism of the West. For this purpose, he combines insights from cultural constructivism with qualitative research methods. Having interviewed blind and sighted US-American individuals, Obasogie concludes from his sample, “blind people have a visual sensibility regarding race that is not unlike that of sighted people” (2014: 80). Many correspondents, for instance, recount events in school in which they became aware of why they were treated or supposed to treat others differently. The belief that white and African American blind people cannot grasp the concept of race/racism, disregards the fact that they partake in and are shaped by the culture surrounding them and that they possess various sensory skills to differentiate people. It belittles their abilities to understand the social repercussions of but also potentials for solidarity within racial positionings. This notion also trivialises how racism operates in framing it as a superficial visual problem and not as a mode of systemic oppression and exclusion with a long history.

That is why Obasogie is critical of a supposedly impartial “colour blindness” which is at times invoked by detractors of affirmative action. Giving preference to equally qualified candidates from underserved communities in college admissions or job searches is construed as an unfair advantage in this reasoning and colour blindness is imagined as embodying the ideal of meritocracy. This allegedly beneficial disregard of difference is also crucial in concerns for legal equality, as Obasogie elaborates:

Colorblindness as a metaphor uses the seemingly concrete notions of vision and its absence—blindness—to give substance to the jurisprudence of nonrecognition and a general ethos that law’s refusal to ‘see’ race is the purest explication of its commitments to racial equality. (2014: 125)

The belief that race should not matter, especially before the law, calling to mind depictions of a blindfolded lady justice, can, despite good intentions, become an obstacle in efforts to redress structural inequalities, as Obasogie notes (2014: 128).¹⁵ He argues that the references to an impartial progressive colour blindness remain “whimsical aspirations” based on “a desire to transcend the messy quagmire of race by envisioning a world where race is visually imperceptible” (Obasogie 2014: 125). The problem of racism would not be alleviated simply by the visual imperceptibility of somatic differences. To return to the insights of critical visuality studies, the visuality of race (and other forms of categorisations) cannot be reduced to empirical perceptibility, it is shaped by social interactions and historical regimes of knowledge production, which also account for different conceptions of how corporeal variety is interpreted as racial (and why blind people participate in these notions). While the historical legacy of chattel slavery, the “one-drop rule”, and segregation under Jim Crow laws have shaped the strong focus on a Black and white binary in the racial formation of the United States (cf. Omi and Winant 2015), other cultures and localities have been impacted by different histories and nomenclatures to conceive of difference and here we could consider, for instance, how caste interacts with colourism in India which is shaped both by precolonial myths of “Aryan” superiority and a postcolonial legacy that is impacted by white beauty ideals and a globalised market of beauty products such as whitening creams (cf. Ayyar and Khandare 2013). This also demonstrates the need to reflect the famous intersectional triad of race, class, and gender from a more pronounced transnational as well as decolonial/postcolonial perspective (cf. Carastathis 2016; Collins and Bilge 2016).

Nonetheless, while a naïve version of colour blindness seems unsuited to achieve more intersectional justice, there are, of course, occasions where the visual remarkability of difference can be a hindrance to more fair treatment and should be disregarded in order to provide greater accessibility. Accordingly, colour blindness is not only evoked in conservative attempts to push back against anti-discrimination legislation. It has also gained prominence in debates around so-called colour-blind casting, sometimes also referred to more neutrally as “nontraditional casting” (cf. Pao 2010: 3–5). The reasoning here is to give a more diverse range of actors the chance to audition for roles that were not specifically written with a person of colour in mind.¹⁶ Such colour-blind casting and gender reversals are increasingly more common in theatrical productions of canonical texts that traditionally include few or no parts for women and/or non-white actors. Moreover, there are now also guidelines to not specify external physical attributes of a character in a screenplay if this is not relevant for the plot to ensure different actors can audition for such roles. Obviously, such casting will not simply erase the socially informed viewing practices of audiences. While it is important to decouple acting from experience, the exclusion of non-white perspectives in the performing arts has limited which stories have been told in the past. This example once more underscores that it is important to become aware of, to see, difference to address social inequality rather than hold on to a supposedly neutral disregard of race—even if that means to purposefully overlook how a role was initially conceived—because heteronormative able-bodied middle-class conceptions of maleness and whiteness are still too often the unmentioned norm which continues to limit accessibility in the acting professions. Accordingly, the pressure to cast more diverse actors in a variety of roles needs to be accompanied by a simultaneous effort to tell stories that are more inclusive of experiences of racism, transphobia, and ableism and the few roles that exist along those lines should not continue to be embodied by the same range of white abled-bodied cis performers. Previously, actors were often rewarded with prestigious accolades precisely for their ability to perform queerness, transness, or disabledness on the screen, which draws more attention to the spectacle of transformation than to the story that is told. This kind of conflation can even produce unintentional harmful effects, for instance, when trans women are portrayed by cis men as this can reinforce the trope of trans women as supposedly predatory “cross-dressing men”. However, as mentioned repeatedly, we should not reduce an intersectional approach to visuality to questions of representation solely. Visuality does not only pertain to the perception or depiction of bodies or even our sensory capacities. It is also shaped by the technologies and media that are used to produce, consume, and circulate images.

This nexus becomes apparent when we consider how media are intrinsically racialised, for instance. Already in 1997, Richard Dyer discusses how media apparatuses privilege whiteness and to this day, the filming of darker skin tones requires additional care from cinematographers given technological limitations. Dyer states, “photo and film apparatuses have seemed to work better with light-skinned people, but that is because they were made that way, not because they could be no other way” (1997: 90). This kind of inbuilt technological bias continues to impact various technologies. Obasogie mentions a Nikon digital camera that kept asking users if they “blinked” when they took portraits of Asian people and sensors of various devices that failed to detect Black bodies properly or not at all. Another example Obasogie provides is the by now discontinued Microsoft Kinect motion sensing input device which was part of the Xbox 360 console. This device which looks similar to a large webcam was added to the gaming console, it directly captured the movement of players via camera, microphone, and infrared sensors, and that let users control their avatars on the screen hands-free directly via their own body movements. Like other sensor devices, the Kinect seemed to initially perform poorly with non-white bodies (Obasogie 2014: 41–43). Such failures to program “computer vision” using AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems can be explained both by the predominance of white (male) developers and their (unconscious) assumptions that users would look like themselves as well as by the lack of diversity of test subjects and data (and this is very much a question of resources that are spent in development and training of the algorithms of the machines). Machine Learning (ML) is based on pattern matching and if one prepares the algorithm with initially biased information, this will only be aggravated over time. While the technology of the sensors would not respond properly to the real-life variety of its users, players, however, could easily personalise their avatars reflecting a wide palate of skin tones and body types on the same gaming console. This offer of diverse options is by now also common in emojis that are used on numerous digital communication platforms. Both are examples of what one could call (a kind of “United Colors of Benetton”) surface diversity that simply multiplies the options. Whilst catering to varied consumers on the level of more representative digital interfaces, this surface diversity does not confront the simultaneous deeply flawed power imbalance in the materiality of how techno-capitalism operates in producing technologies and devices with which we interact more and more extensively and intimately in our daily lives. The rapidly progressing development of self-driving cars but also forms of automated surveillance of public spaces, for instance, like the gaming console, are based on a range of sensors and their interaction with AI algorithms. The lack of proper recognition of darker-skinned people that continues to sway the development of such technological tools is thus not simply an aesthetic issue of demanding better representation of non-white bodies but could potentially have lethal effects. Representation and recognition thus affect different dimensions of technological and media development that each requires an intersectional enquiry into how they operate.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, for example, highlights the tensions between privacy and hypervisibility that shape the Internet use of marginalised communities. While early cyberfeminism often imagined an optimistic version of a utopian “gender free” world wide web, we now learn more and more about “algorithmic stratification” (McMillan Cottom 2016: 211). In her intersectional analysis of online for-profit education in the US, McMillan Cottom argues that it is specifically lower income women of colour who are being coaxed into taking up more and more debt to invest in their education through targeted advertising on proprietary platforms. In this way, social inequalities are in fact exacerbated. McMillan Cottom explains, “algorithms […] stratify group-based access to critical institutions such as markets, financial institutions, education, and work. […] These differences were as much about categorical power relationships as about individual identity. […] What we do online is, in part, about who we are categorically when we do it” (2016: 218). Thus, there remains an insoluble tension between seeking connection, to be recognised as someone with similar experiences and needs, as women of colour did in closed Facebook groups to exchange information about education and professional development, and the ways in which capitalist technology controls and stratifies the access to resources, by using the demographic data of the participants in such groups to place targeted ads. An intersectional interrogation of social media thus needs to combine the interest in the representational dimension with an awareness of the materiality and economic structures that enable and stratify digital visibility.

The notion of socially homogenous groups and their relation to identity categories and/or identification however do not always correspond to the ways in which digital media have also changed our perception of social interactions and intimacies. Shaka McGlotten, one of the speakers in the “conversations” series that preceded this publication (cf. Chap. 3), underlines the contemporary digitally mediated nature of (queer) virtual intimacies which should not be simply derided as “less real”. Digital media promise evermore customised content and experiences and one cannot underestimate the affective allure that these digitally mediated forms of interaction exude. On the one hand, McGlotten argues, chat rooms, instant messaging, social media platforms, dating sites, and hook-up apps, enable users to evade “sexuality as a kind of identitarian demand”. Users of such technologies do not need to be “out” or legible as “gay” and instead often seek fleeting experiences and relations to create new forms of virtual and non-virtual intimacies. On the other hand, the digitally mediated search for specific forms of sexual encounters and publics nonetheless reproduces hierarchical identitarian exclusions (most notably by pre-sorting possible matches according to age, ability, and race, e.g.). In McGlotten’s words, “if people entered in the qualities they thought they wanted in a search engine, they would be less open to other possibilities that might occur in real world queer spaces” (2013: 6). Digital intimacies are hence both regulated by technological constrictions and human bias, but they also hold the potential for encounters across pre-defined identities and borders.

Stephanie Comilang’s short science-fiction documentary Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) (2016), which was screened during one of the “conversations” events, focuses on different digitally mediated social connections which Filipina migrant workers establish in Central Hong Kong. As Tiara Roxanne describes in greater detail in Chap. 3, the film, which can be read as a sci-fi exploration of the community-building potential of digital communication, prompted us to reflect on the tension of demarcating where similarity ends, and difference begins. A person’s positionality can shift in relation to the geographical and national contexts one inhabits. Accordingly, critics such as Floya Anthias (2013) speak of “translocational” positionalities to emphasise social space rather than fixed social identity.¹⁷ In this way, Anthias relates intersectionality more strongly to contexts of migration and can, for instance, account for changes regarding experiences of privilege and marginalisation within life stories. This kind of mobility in identity formation also matches what Magdalena Nowicka describes concerning her work with Polish migrants and their understanding of whiteness (cf. Chap. 2). Dealing with inner-Asian migration from the Philippines to Hong Kong, space and location, rather than supposedly evident visual markers of difference and identity categories, are vital to grasp the precarious networks of identification in Comilang’s film. Sometimes shot in close vicinity to the protagonists via their interaction with their mobile devices, sometimes from the bird’s-eye view of the drone hovering above, Comilang employs a meditative film language that centres on the affective structures of care and community building among the Filipina migrant workers. The women seek to connect outside of the confines of their employers’ homes, claiming public spaces as a place for physical self-expression such as dance and meditation and the joint preparation and consumption of food. In the film, the women use the disembodied digital storage of the drone to upload their self-produced content. The drone (or ghost) “Paradise” promises connectivity apart from their daily chores. It transcends their current locality and creates a communal archive of their experiences. In this way, the women’s mobile phones become an extension of their constricted mobility in Hong Kong society and a means to create conviviality with those with whom they share the self-created islands of shelter in Central, Hong Kong’s business district, as well as those whom they left behind in their home communities. As this example underlines, while social media might transcend certain national borders, from an intersectional point of view, we also need to address the actual geographical and social forms of mobility that these media afford and the kind of often invisible postcolonial entanglements of economic exploitation they exacerbate (cf. also Bergermann 2012).

The 2018 documentary film The Cleaners (dir. Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck) depicts the mental toll that the outsourced labour of content moderation for social networks and sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter takes on those who are employed by subcontractors in the Philippines. Having to review ubiquitous offensive and upsetting visual materials (live streams, videos, and images), these moderators only have seconds to decide if content should be labelled objectionable because it is deemed pornographic or part of terrorist propaganda and is therefore in violation of the community standards of the platform in question, or, whether said material falls under artistic or journalistic licence and freedom of speech. These digital workers are incessantly exposed to hours of harmful visual content so that most users are not confronted with the less palatable aspects of social networks in their daily interactions with such media. Both the disagreeable content but also the mechanisms of content moderation remain invisible. Our contemporary interconnected forms of communication and circulation of images thus are not simply free-floating globalised networks of ever more visual content but embedded in the manifold disparities between capitalist aspiration in the Global North and the outsourced “dirty work” in the Global South. These mechanisms are also embroiled in the increasingly complex competing national interests of authoritarian regimes which are trying to reinforce censorship of disagreeable political content as well as the competing attempts to foreclose the spreading of false information and propaganda. To develop the approach of “revis(ualis)ing” intersectionality further, we cannot stop at the level of ornamental “surface” diversity. We must consider that digital media are agents in shaping our conceptions of in/visibility at the level of technology development, social and intimate interaction between users that include both potentials as well as restrictions in terms of community building, and that they are also reliant on the global division of labour in maintaining networks of distribution.

As outlined in the beginning, visuality is not only a question of in/visibility (in the media) or seeing versus not seeing something. It also concerns the question of how vision is tied to the exertion of power within embodied looking regimes. The shortcomings that I have described in relation to digital media also affect the human gaze and how we perceive others. To be clear, the problem is not one of remarking physical differences. On the subject of cross-ethnic representation, Rey Chow importantly reminds us that stereotypes are not simply a case of benign misrepresentation. She writes, “Contrary to the charge that they are misrepresentations, therefore, stereotypes have demonstrated themselves to be effective, realistic political weapons capable of generating belief, commitment, and action” (2010: 53). Vision is far from neutral and the question of recognition often a matter of survival. In the incessant instances of police brutality against Black people in the United States and elsewhere, time and again children’s age is supposedly “misrecognised”, as in the 2014 murder of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice who was shot by a white police officer while playing with a toy gun in a park.¹⁸ In another more recent case in 2021, police in Rochester, New York, called to deal with what was described as “family trouble”, handcuffed a 9-year-old Black girl who is not identified by name in the reports on the case. The footage of the body camera video shows that initially, the girl resists being forcefully put in the back of a police vehicle. When she is finally in the back of the car with her feet still hanging out of the door, one of the numerous officers involved reprimands her, “You’re acting like a child”, to which the girl responds aggravated, “I am a child, [what] the fuck”.¹⁹ Instead of being perplexed by this exchange, the participating police officers do not change their harsh handling of the upset child. Clearly still distraught, demanding to see her father repeatedly, a white female officer eventually uses pepper spray on the crying young girl. Such cases of abuse and excessive force on Black minors, especially Black girls, are so frequent that the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality speaks of “adultification bias” in this context.²⁰ The officers have enough time to visually inspect the young girl, they are even reminded by the child herself of her lacking maturity, but they fail to conclude from this that she deserves the same care that one would imagine should be afforded to a nine-year-old in mental and physical distress. In her book In the Wake, Christina Sharpe characterises this kind of continued devaluation of Black life as part of a mundane deadly climate of anti-Blackness that is even more far-reaching than the characterisation of such forms of discrimination simply as ethnic or racial “bias” would imply. Sharpe draws connections across time to depict “the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity” (2016: 14). To comprehend the contemporary effects that race has on different bodies and the way we are seen and we see others, we need to acknowledge the longue durée of modes of dehumanisation and the ways in which the history of enslavement and colonialism impacts the misrecognition and brutalisation of Black and people of colour to this very day. Mobile phones, bodycams, and the distribution of such incriminating evidence on social media have amplified the voices of Black Lives Matter activists despite the still shocking lack of accountability for these violations. In addition to the social responsibility to look at such footage, hashtags such as “#saytheirnames” are an urgent reminder to acknowledge the lives lost to racist violence as lives that mattered, as the cutting short of potential. The relentless visual spectacle of Black suffering nonetheless remains highly ambivalent, and understandably, there is also a hunger to see other images and not to be confronted with such traumatising footage over and over. Artistic practice is one response to this desire and often functions as a realm of resistance, a visual means to respond to intersectional injustice and the need to be recognised. In other words, while I keep emphasising the limits of a simplistic model of positive counter images, there is, of course, a yearning for new visual imaginaries to move beyond the spectacle of Othering bodies that has historically characterised hegemonic visual cultures for far too long.²¹ So, while revis(ualis)ing intersectionality requires a focus on the nexus of power, subjugation, and vision, this form of analysis is also invested in exploring alternative ways of seeing.

Other Modes of Seeing, Other Modes of Being

In the following I wish to complicate the question of representation and identification via a discussion of the potential of post-representational artistic practices, of disidentification as a queering of identification with visual depictions, as well as of opacity as the refusal of representation. Like a more complex understanding of in/visibility in relation to community building, representation and identification cannot be reduced to a mimetic model of recognition and misrecognition. Conceptually, we should be especially careful not to conflate diversity and intersectionality. One does not arrive at a more “intersectional” visual culture simply by depicting a range of “diverse” bodies (and this would tie in with my earlier critique of a superficial multiplication of options as a form of “surface diversity”). This becomes especially problematic if the focus is on the representation of a singular body. If intersectionality is represented as the visualisation of an individual body, one ends up reducing intersectionality to an additive model of visible markers of difference.²² There is always vulnerability in showing specific bodies and thus representation, identification, and recognition need to be framed as more complex relational networks between different bodies and not limited to the fixed (visual) characteristics of a person. So, instead of fetishising individual bodies, a revis(ualis)ing of intersectionality requires an engagement with different modes of seeing and conversely different modes of being.

At the turn of the century, a new generation of African American and artists of African heritage rose to prominence under the label “post-Black” art. Instead of resorting to imagery of Black and white bodies and the visual representation of glaring racist violence in their works, post-representational aesthetics avoid the spectacularising fixation on Black bodies and Black suffering. As Nana Adusei-Poku (2021) argues in her study of artists that belong to this group, including Marc Bradford, Leslie Hewitt, Mickalene Thomas, and Hank Willis Thomas,²³ such creative practice does not neglect histories of racism but uses abstract aesthetic means instead of mimetic depictions of Black figures to visualise the experience of being Black. Bradford’s “Enter and Exit the New Negro” (2000), whose aesthetic at first glance evokes abstract or minimalist art, according to Adusei-Poku’s (2012) interpretation of the title and the usage of endpapers in this artwork, demonstrates a desire to transcend identitarian limitations of constantly being reduced to an essentialised racialised positionality that is tied to physical difference. The choice of materials, which are a staple in Black hair salons and used for permanent-wave treatments, are employed in a manner that produces a simple monochromatic grid but can still be deciphered as referencing a specific racialised experience since hair is an especially potent signifier within racist looking regimes (cf. Mercer 1994). Adusei-Poku relates Bradford’s artistic practice to a queer utopian potential of becoming that is less interested in fixing identity but exploring different modalities of bodies in relation to each other. Abstraction can thus be a means to reflect on racialisation without fixing the signifiers of race on the body. In addition to such post-Black artistic practice, queer and transgender studies have also explored how fine arts, cinema, and visual culture more broadly can challenge modes of corporal fixing.

In In a Queer Time and Place, Jack Halberstam (2005: 97–124) reads a range of abstract paintings and installations by artists such as Eva Hesse and Linda Besemer as transgender art—not because they show trans people, but because they embody a trans sensibility or aesthetic—a way of not fitting into the confines of a cis and heteronormative here and now. Halberstam argues that visual representations of transness have privileged transsexual embodiment which can be linked to postmodernity’s fixation on ambiguity. But in this way, the trans body is often reduced to a spectacular prop. Instead, Halberstam is interested in a “technotopian, or spatially imaginative formulation of a body” (2005: 101). Hesse and Besemer use abstract means to visualise forms of embodiment that are processual rather than fixed.²⁴ Accordingly, Halberstam reads Besemer’s colourful abstract “paint sculptures” made from brushstrokes of solidified acrylic paint that exceed the confines of the pictorial frame as a queering of more controlled and often implicitly male ideals of abstract artmaking. This art is non-narrative, it does not index a female or transgender body and yet it intervenes into male-dominated forms of artistic image production (cf. 2005: 121–122). Such a focus on form is also something that trans cinema scholars advocate.

Moving away from the logic of the shocking “reveal” that has dominated popular TV genres and narrative cinema by voyeuristically disclosing the trans body, which, thereby, is reduced to genitalia, Eliza Steinbock explores more experimental aesthetics of aligning trans embodiment and cinematic image production. Focusing on “shimmering” as “a concept for change in its emergent, flickering form” (2019: 8), Steinbock argues that

transgender and cinematic aesthetics alike operate through the bodily practice and technological principle of disjunction. More radically, within practices of filmmaking delinking and relinking across the cuts, gaps, fissures take place in the normal course of cinematography, rather than being exceptions. This makes it the art form most suited to a politically advantageous comparison with transgender forms of embodiment. (2019: 6)

Steinbock refers to practices like the phantasmagoria that go all the way back to George Meliès’s early experiments with filmic montage and optical illusions, but which can also be found in contemporary trans artists Zackary Drucker and A.L. Steiner’s work in which they complicate linear notions of before and after based on the cinematic capacity to achieve instant change by joining different images. The juxtaposition of the neat before and after reveal is rendered less linear and more opaque through double exposure and duplex photography in the artists’ collaboration in a series of photographs (Steinbock 2019: 54). Drucker and Steiner thus use formal means to challenge narratives of gender transition but do not entirely relinquish the trans body as the subject of visual representation. These brief examples show that a whole range of formal choices exist that can be utilised to challenge the hegemonic gaze on “Other” bodies, and this is also to underscore that there is no simple binary of mimetic forms of representation as inherently lacking and post-representational art as automatically progressive. There are different ways through which the image repertoire can be expanded to avoid an objectifying aesthetics.²⁵

But even within the realm of more hegemonic forms of representation, marginalised communities have found ways of resistance on the level of identification with such content. José Esteban Muñoz, whose work was crucial in establishing the field of queer of colour critique, criticises linear (often psychoanalytically inflected) models of identification that presume a heteronormative pattern of desire in his analyses of film, performance, and art.²⁶ While post-representational art and trans artistic practice challenge the fixing of identity as bodily difference at the level of the visual text, Muñoz additionally queers the process of identification with forms of (visual) representation. Going beyond Stuart Hall’s famous model of encoding/decoding that distinguishes “dominant-hegemonic” codes, “negotiated” codes, and “oppositional” codes (Hall 1991 [1973]), Muñoz is concerned with “bad objects” of identification. Muñoz mentions that queer men of colour, for instance, often imagine themselves in the position of the glamorous white Hollywood diva in film. But this does not mean that they uncritically wish to emulate white femininity. He describes this as a more complex form of “disidentification” with white feminine beauty ideals. These are queer desires that do not follow a strict identitarian logic (and are therefore hard to grasp in either a psychoanalytical or an intersectional matrix). Muñoz writes,

queer desires, perhaps desires that negate self, desire for a white beauty ideal, are reconstituted by an ideological component that tells us that such modalities of desire and desiring are too self-compromising. We thus disidentify with the white ideal. We desire it but desire it with a difference. The negotiations between desire, identification, and ideology are a part of the important work of disidentification. (1999: 15)

In this sense, disidentification is an anti-assimilationist strategy that minoritarian subjects resort to in encounters with existing forms of representation. It is both resistant and productive in enabling alternative forms of desire that might not have been the intended meaning of a work of art. Representation and identification are hence not limited to a linear heteronormative model, and marginalised subjects have always found ways of imagining themselves into fictional worlds, even worlds that disavowed them (cf. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1997) notion of a “reparative reading”). Other ways of seeing can thus include the production of alternative imageries but there is also the potential of gleaning pleasure from forms of representation that are not made with a certain audience in mind, as Muñoz emphasises. Yet another strategy relates to a more radical refusal to be represented within normative orders entirely.

This refusal of representation relates to the juxtaposition of transparency and opacity. French-Martinican philosopher and writer Édouard Glissant (1997: 111–120) uses the visual metaphor of opacity to question the transparent logic of linguistic correspondence. He demands the right to not be legible within specific hegemonic codes and dismisses the notion of a standard language. Glissant highlights the ambiguity of literary translation and proclaims a poetics of opacity that cannot be reduced to one correct meaning. This also concerns the question of identity and the relational qualities of identity formation as well as the limits of ever being fully “transparent”, even to oneself. Opacity also points to the tensions between interpellation, identification, and affect (cf. Gunkel et al. 2015). Kara Keeling elaborates on the “right to opacity” as both a strategy of artistic practice but also engrained in political fights of populations that are constantly exposed to violent modes of surveillance and seek to imagine another world apart from constraints of group classification:

To insist upon a group’s ‘right to opacity’ in sociocultural terms, therefore, is to challenge the processes of commensuration built into the demand for that group to become perceptible according to existing conceptions of the world. It is a way of asserting the existence in this world of another conception of the world, incomprehensible from within the common senses that secure existing hegemonic relations […]. (Keeling 2019: 31)

Such a counter-hegemonic insistence on the right to opacity can also be found in critical migration studies that are inspired by Deleuzian philosophy. Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos, for instance, mention practices such as the burning of documents or the strategic rehearsed responses to the standardised interview questions that refugees are subjected to. They argue that migrants negotiate demands of identification in ways that exceed conceptions of representation. They write, “Instead of visibility, we say imperceptibility. Instead of being perceptible, discernible, identifiable, current migration puts on the agenda a new form of politics and a new formation of active political subjects whose aim is not a different way to become and to be a political subject but to refuse to become a subject at all” (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2008: online). In this way, the authors contest more radically whether political subjectivity requires legible representation. While there is a danger in romanticising the refusal of legible subjectivity within surveillant migration regimes as a form of active refusal and not consider it also as the result of a more fundamental disenfranchisement, I think we must recognise agency when it comes to migrants’ tactics of resisting scripts that reduce them to idealised objects of an often sentimental and objectifying gaze. In this understanding, the right to opacity is another way of disrupting notions of politics and representation.²⁷

So far in this section, I have discussed various alternative ways of seeing that challenge clear-cut identities: post-representational art, disidentification, and opacity, which already points more strongly in the direction of other modes of being rather than modes of seeing. Our understanding of visual culture and intersectionality therefore cannot be limited to image production and circulation in the media, and we should also consider visuality in relation to the larger public sphere. This finally brings me to questions of security and accessibility of public space that are intertwined with regimes of visibility (cf. Brighenti 2010).

In their 1998 essay “Sex in Public”, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner famously argue that sentimental national culture and heteronormativity are linked via a familial imaginary of the nation state. They explain: “Heteronormativity is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangements of social life: nationality, the state, and the law; commerce; medicine; and education; as well as in the conventions and affects of narrativity, romance, and other protected spaces of culture” (Berlant and Warner 1998: 554–555). Following this logic, normativity can be quite literally described as a “comfort zone” that excludes those who do not fit the mould. In The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed similarly evokes the image of the comfort zone to explain normativity. She writes,

Normativity is comfortable for those who can inhabit it. The word ‘comfort’ suggests wellbeing and satisfaction, but it also suggests an ease and easiness. To follow the rules of heterosexuality is to be at ease in a world […]. Heteronormativity functions as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape. Those spaces are lived as comfortable as they allow bodies to fit in; the surfaces of social space are already impressed upon by the shape of such bodies (like a chair that acquires its shape by the repetition of some bodies inhabiting it […]). (Ahmed 2004: 147–148)

Heteronormativity is understood here as predicated on normative embodiment that, in turn, is the precondition both for recognition and for comfortable access to social space. Consequently, disrupting binary identity categories and modes of identification is not limited to artistic practice but is also significant in how we engage with our daily surroundings. In Ahmed’s words, public space is already “impressed” by the normative iterative practices of those who inhabit it, and this extends to how it is visually structured. Signs guide us, but also represent socially accepted norms. They, for example, direct us to the bathroom that is supposedly appropriate for our gender.

The debate around the accessibility of public restrooms is thus one more pertinent example to discuss the visuality of the public sphere. One can, of course, begin with the signage that at times exceeds the traditional triad of “male”, “female”, and “accessible” restrooms for people with disabilities (and the icons depicting wheelchair users have been criticised precisely because of their “ungendering” of people with disabilities). By now, there are creative and playful forms of visual representation that range from multiplying the options, merging male and female symbols, or resorting to non-human bodies, such as animals, mermaids, and aliens. Sometimes signs also depict the installed appliances (a toilet with a seat vs. a urinal, etc.) rather than the assumed users of these. And while such representational multiplicity can be a step in the right direction, the problem runs much deeper than simply offering more inclusive visual signage.

Trans activists have been especially critical of how there is now generally a celebration of more visible trans (media) representation—at least within US-American and some Western European media—and too little engagement with the lived realities of trans people. Specifically within public spaces, the hypervisibility of trans women of colour can often be fatal. In the introduction to the collection Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, editors Reina Gossett [Tourmaline], Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, write succinctly, “the question arises of whether visibility is a goal to be worked toward or an outcome to be avoided at all costs” (2017: xx). Thus, the solution to more accessible public space in this case is not simply a separately marked “transgender facility”, as this would expose already vulnerable constituents to more potential public surveillance and scrutiny. There remains a fundamental ambiguity in becoming more visible within mainstream representation. Coinciding with the greater visibility in the media, there are also numerous attempts of policing public spaces as, for instance, in the various cases at the state level in the United States to legally regulate trans access not only to public restrooms but also to health care. What is happening in relation to this form of “bathroom panic” is not a new development at all. As part of this backlash, transgender people are vilified as a threat to the safety and comfort of others by resorting to worn-out tropes. Trans women are, all too often, stigmatised as “sexual predators”, and cis women their “prey”, following this transphobic logic renounced as “men in disguise” entering women’s spaces. Trans women urinating in a stall next to supposedly innocent young girls is turned into a doomsday-like scenario by the conservative right and says as much about their imagination of trans people as of young women’s status as victims in need of paternalistic protection (cf. Sanders and Stryker 2016: 780). Trans activists have taken to social media and provided funny memes against this bigotry using the hashtag #wejustneedtopee (cf. Koch-Rein et al. 2020: 3). Architect Joel Sanders and transgender historian Susan Stryker demonstrate that there are many historical resonances in this kind of policing: women were kept from entering the paid workforce by denying them proper facilities, there is the long history of segregated bathrooms and water fountains that excluded African Americans and against which the civil rights movement protested, and there was also a public panic around gay men posing a threat of “contamination” during the Aids crisis. Sanders and Stryker write,

the public restroom stages the transformation of an abstract concern into a tangible threat, by virtue of it being a physical space in which so-called normal citizens are brought into intimate physical proximity with precisely those presumably nonnormal people whose expulsion from or invisibilization within the body politic underpins and enables our society’s norms of embodied personhood. (2016: 779–780)

Instead of limiting access according to identity (and to avoid the cultural fearmongering around these debates as “politically correct” identity politics and culture wars), we should instead ask how we can imagine more inclusive public spaces. Do we need to order spaces according to a binary understanding of gender (identity) or are there more productive ways to imagine them as accommodating different practices (or modes of being)?

If we move away from identity and focus more on accessibility in the discussion on public restrooms, we need to shift from narrowly, and often voyeuristically, fixating on trans bodies and instead take seriously how we could make these spaces safer and more accessible for more bodies with different needs and potential impairments, including people who need to assist young children or the elderly. Judith Butler proposes to destroy what has been built badly as a counter-hegemonic strategy. Butler states, “Dismantling forms of oppression, for instance, involves a certain way of destroying what has been built badly, built in ways that are consequential in the damage they cause. So to damage a damaging machine in the name of less damage, is that possible?” (Butler in Ahmed 2016: 3). If we believe this is possible, we need to visualise these spaces as accommodating more than the binary of male and female, and what is required then is a better design that is mindful of different types of embodiment instead of simply better representation of bodies in regard to the visual signage. That is why Sanders and Stryker have teamed up with legal scholar Terry Kogan and founded the Stalled! Project²⁸ to propose concrete design and best practice guidelines for all-gender restrooms. Their design recommendations suggest different “activity zones” within a relatively barrier-free open precinct. In this project, they not only address trans bathroom access but also focus on design to reimagine the public restroom so that it is less restricted by the identity of the people who use it and becomes more broadly inclusive as an accessible public environment.

We can also extend this conversation to questions of global justice and the lack of proper access to clean water and sanitation in the Global South that also urgently require feasible solutions. Critics point out that the lacking access to safe toilets impacts a range of problems that aggravate specific vulnerabilities of women, such as the fear of being subjected to sexualised violence and rape, but also give rise to numerous health problems, such as kidney disease, resulting from bathroom avoidance (cf. Panchang et al. 2021). Once more, we see that the interrelation of visuality, identities, and intersectional justice require extended vocabularies of analysis that go beyond pre-defined categorical frameworks.

My final example draws again on our “conversations” series: Doireann O’ Malley’s film Prototypes . This film probes various constellations of psychoanalytical discourses around (trans)gender identity. Moreover, the film in its visual depiction of bodies navigating different spaces can also be understood as linking transness to architecture, as Roxanne explains in greater detail (cf. Chap. 3). The many over the shoulder shots of walking protagonists invite the viewers to navigate different spaces with and from the perspective of the protagonists. The film undermines how transness has been traditionally visualised, namely as a form of confinement to the “wrong body”. With its inclusion of a kind of time-space portal, the viewers also travel across time with the characters. In this way, the process of transitioning itself is reimagined as a kind of spatio-temporal “time travel” that teleports the protagonist to another dimension. While walking through different urban spaces and entering and exiting different buildings, one of the protagonists talks about how testosterone has “opened doors” for them. Transitioning is a way of navigating new spaces that are shaped by different architectures. Similarly, Halberstam identifies a shift in trans studies “from the idea of embodiment as being housed in one’s flesh to embodiment as a more fluid architectural project” (2018: 24). Prototypes is about such an “architectural” depiction of embodiment that can be designed and redesigned. Transitioning is not narrated as a linear journey of one singular or extraordinary individual. The film highlights connections between trans people and depicts a range of gender variance. Prototypes’ protagonists navigate spaces alone and together and, as a result, the film is not restricted to a homogenous understanding of what being trans means or looks like.

This form of challenging fixed identity via collectivity, which implies an ephemeral understanding of spatio-temporal communion, is what the formulation “modes of being” gestures towards. It is inspired by José Muñoz’s writing on a critical queer utopianism (2019). In the posthumous publication The Sense of Brown, Muñoz introduces the term “the brown commons” to underline the conceptual difference between identity and “a sense of being-in-common as it is transmitted, across people, places, and spaces” (Muñoz 2020: 3). Accordingly, “modes of being” are attached to shared struggles but also an understanding of “collectivity with and through the incommensurable” (Muñoz 2020: 7). In a way, O’Malley’s film, which like Comilang’s Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso employs sci-fi elements, asks its viewers to exceed the current limitations of political discourse. This is to demonstrate that “other modes of seeing” embodiment are inextricably linked to the political intersectional project of pushing the boundaries of accessibility of both real and imaginary spaces to imagine “other modes of being”.

Concluding Remarks

As I have argued in this chapter, the question to what end visibility is used yields multiple answers. Sometimes visibility is evoked as a demand for more inclusive representation and a different kind of media access. At other times, visibility can turn into harmful hypervisibility and surveillance. Consequently, an intersectional analysis of visual culture needs to probe the nuances of visuality and come up with different vocabularies of critical enquiry which are oftentimes limited by our desires to fit into existing categories and established types of representation as a form of social recognition. Thinking through visibility and intersectionality can result in an attentiveness to hegemonic imaginations of difference and the concomitant forms of discrimination. But in this process, we should also consider creative ways of resistance that include alternative aesthetics, queer forms of disidentification, and the refusal to be relegated to positions of Otherness. Our examination of visibility should not be limited to intersectionality as the representation of identities and more diversity in the media; rather, it should focus more on questions of relationality and accessibility. This also means that we must take into account the material effects that visual sorting has within the unequal postcolonial distribution of power which, in turn, influences the development of media under the conditions of technocapitalism and the global circulation of images. In this understanding, more expansive, accessible, and just modes of being are predicated ultimately on a willingness for more speculative forms of seeing and imagining the world otherwise.