Visibility and the Primacy of Sight

Mary Ganster
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

Whenever it’s a day of visibility or awareness, I think about the primacy of sight/the visual in our culture. Seeing is believing. A picture is worth 1000 words. As if the only way we observe, interpret, and come to know our world & one another is through sight. I mean, even the word “observe” has become conflated with “to watch,” “to look at,” or “to see.”

I come at this from the PoV of someone whose differences aren’t immediately visible to others. I hesitate to call my disabilities “invisible,” because they’re definitely visible to people who know enough. My wife sees how chronic pain is written on my body even if Joe Schmo doesn’t, can’t, or won’t. Close co-workers might come to notice, for example, that I sit in a certain way when I’m having a bad pain day. Other neurodivergent people will notice me stim covertly, just as I might notice signs of their sensory overload.

I also come at this from the PoV of a literature scholar who knows that representation is everything. So basically, I know that visibility is important in advancing social justice causes, I know intimately how lack of visibility hurts, but I also know that visibility isn’t always safe, nor does visibility automatically equate to equity or acceptance.

I don’t agree that ALL figurative language that uses the body as a metaphor is inherently ableist, but I do think that the primacy of sight and the visual are key contributors to ableism.

Also anti-fat rhetoric is like entirely predicated on the idea that what we “look like” determines everything about us. People feel free to comment on others’ bodies, especially particularly abnormal or aberrant. (Note on the ways dominant culture acts like they own women’s pregnancies. How that’s fucked up & wrong — people touch pregnant women’s bodies freely.)(Insert note on white people touching black people without consent.)(Insert note about how pregnancy and skin color are observed primarily via sight.)

The overall cultural discourse is one by which one’s visible body (and actions) comes to stand in for or function as an indicator of their greater worth, value, and capacity for “success.” We are taught via this discourse that when we look at you and judge you, the further away you appear from the non-marked normal body of the white middle-class abled cishetero man, the “worse” you must be, qualitatively, in some way.

The further you are from that norm, the more people feel validated not only in developing opinions about you but also freer to share those opinions with apparent authority, publicly or privately.

And visibility isn’t just about the body itself, because the body itself isn’t a thing that can be separated from embodiment, corporeality, ontology, cultural expression, consciousness.

In other words, when we look at someone else, sure, we judge their body’s distance from various norms, but we’re also judging how they’re dressed, how they appear to be interacting with others, and other possible behaviors we may deem outside the realm of “normal” or “typical.”

Those are all aspects of embodiment — things that involve the body and are done “in the body”. Corporeality — the experience of being embodied; how it feels to be an embodied being. Ontology — our ways of being in the world; how we navigate and move through life. Consciousness — our awareness of ourselves as actors or agents in the world; awareness of self, others, systems, institutions, local vs global, and so on.

Look at thing. Assess thing visually. Apply label. Now you know what it is, you can anticipate its behavior, and come to control and marginalize it. The more aberrant the body, the further marginalized it is. Pushed out to the very edges, if not off the edges, where few people notice and those who do are powerless to affect real change.

Mary Ganster

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Queer, ADHD, Disabled writer, educator, artist. Follow me on Twitter @extravaganster