Revisualising Intersectionality

Revisualising Intersectionality offers transdisciplinary interrogations of the supposed visual evidentiality of categories of human similarity and difference. This open-access book incorporates insights from social and cognitive science as well as psychology and philosophy to explain how we visually perceive physical differences and how cognition is fallible, processual, and dependent on who is looking in a specific context. Revisualising Intersectionality also puts into conversation visual culture studies and artistic research with approaches such as gender, queer, and trans studies as well as postcolonial and decolonial theory to complicate simplified notions of identity politics and cultural representation. The book proposes a revision of intersectionality research to challenge the predominance of categories of visible difference such as race and gender as analytical lenses. Funding Acknowledgement 5 Acknowledgements 6 Contents 7 List of Figures 9 Chapter 1: Introduction: Revisualising Intersectionality 10 Works Cited 17 Chapter 2: Where Difference Begins 19 Surfaces 21 A Third Race 23 The Power of Seeing 28 Intersectional Perspectives 30 Do We See What Is There? 33 How Do We See What We See? 35 Seeing Through Culture 37 Towards Intersectional Stereotyping 40 Attention: Exposure, Salience, Foregrounding 43 Conclusions 46 Works Cited 49 Chapter 3: Revisualising Intersectionality: Conversations 62 Trans* 65 Sameness 69 Perception 72 Intimacy 75 Conclusion 80 Works Cited 81 Films: 81 Lectures: 81 Performances: 81 Texts: 81 Chapter 4: The Ends of Visibility 83 Visual Culture and Intersectionality 83 Seeing Too Little, Seeing Too Much 91 Other Modes of Seeing, Other Modes of Being 100 Concluding Remarks 109 Works Cited 115 Films 120 Chapter 5: Conclusion: Revising Intersectionality 121 Works Cited 130 Index 132