Voice, Vision, and Veiling

Abstract

In this chapter, I am principally concerned with testing a reversal of the direction of the gaze—not with what happens when we are looked at, but what happens when we are allowed to watch. I want to show how being allowed to watch is in fact the occasion of being seen by oneself, of placing the observer’s body visibly in his or her own field of vision, in the world, and that this imagining of one’s own body in the world is integral to cultivating a historical agency. I concluded the last chapter by arguing that at its core, Shirin Neshat’s joyous aesthetics of the living body represses its most fearful remembrance of a politics of deadly despair. In this chapter, I want to see how a bodily memory is formed by actively imagining itself in public and whether or not it can defy its entrapment in and by political power. I said in the last chapter that the more actively Shirin Neshat beatifies the body, the more evidently it resonates the politics of its hidden horrors. In this chapter, I want to work through the specifics of a visionary poet, Forough Farrokhzad, and a succession of women filmmakers to see and demonstrate how their poetic perceptions ipso facto posit a farsighted recital that is never to be blinded, benighted, or banned. If Shirin Neshat’s aesthetic beatification of the body is canonical and hallowed and thus mirrors in hope the despair of its disemboweled politics, as I argued in the last chapter, here I want to see how a visionary poet and the sorority of farsighted filmmakers she made possible retrieve and restore agential memory to a body—outlasting, perhaps, the politics of its despair and the aesthetics of its hope.