Theresa Heyd, Miriam Neuhausen, and Vroni Zieglmeier, Anglistisches Seminar, Univ. Heidelberg (Web)
Time: 30.09.-02.10.2026
Venue: Heidelberg
Concepts of in/visibility have played an important role in queer activism and gender studies for a long time. Being seen and being heard, having a voice and a place at the table have been manifest political goals but also powerful metaphors of representation through decades of feminist and queer movements and academic debates. A vocabulary of in/visibility informs many ways of talking about gender, from the metaphor of the closet (Sedgwick 1990, Kibbey 2023) with regard to sexual orientation, to the notion of passing (Goffman 1963) for gender presentation and gender identity. Many aspects of feminist and queer practice rely on becoming visible in public space: women’s marches and pride parades, trans and lesbian days of visibility, material objects such as rainbow flags and pronoun buttons. And in media-saturated and digital contexts, being visible has become an omnipresent metric of the self.
At the same time, visibility has been identified as an ambivalent mechanism with risky implications (Foucault 1975, Schaffer 2008, Beauchamp 2019). Representation and exposure can lead to gender-based surveillance, discrimination, and violence. The very notion of safe spaces, a topic of ridicule in some public discourses, is borne from the notion that visibility may entail vulnerability. While queer visibility has been marketed and commodified under the guise of visibility politics for a long time (Hennessy 1994), many individuals and communities are not able to become visible in their plurality, e.g. people on the move and undocumented migrants (Luibhéid & Chávez 2020), people in war-ridden parts of the Global South (Puar 2007), or disabled and chronically ill people (Hedva 2022). For queer people of color, being visible can also mean being subjected to a colonial, orientalist or white gaze (Ferguson 2003), and visible disabled bodies are often reduced to ‘inspiration porn’ (Grue 2016). Remaining opaque (Glissant 1990), resisting through invisibility (Alloa 2023), and refusing research (Tuck & Yang 2014) have been put forward as productive objections to the white imperative of visibility. Read more … (PDF)
Source: HSozKult (Web)

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