In this presentation, I will be discussing the philosophies and aesthetics of visualising the unseen. While my modality of working is attentive to feminist concerns, this presentation forms part of a larger project involving transport, geo-politics and technologies of power. https://vimeo.com/574437633
We do not just think about the world,; we do not engage with others remotely; we are not disembodied selves. We are in the world. And economics is foremost a social science, despite a veneer of rigorous abstractions and technicalities that make up the bulk of the discipline’s claims to logical coherence. Feminist economics is not economics for women. Feminist economics scrutinises the foundational principles of economics through a gender lens to upend entrenched misconceptions the perpetuate socio-economic and political inequities. Gender is one account of social stratification that intersects with other markers of identity, including race, sexual orientation, age or ability.
Michel Foucault’s theory on the body releases its materiality from biology. Strategies of ‘corporeal oppression’ ‘discipline’ bodies to render them ‘docile’ and amenable to systems of organisation constructed through dynamics of power. Foucault argues there is no single centralised authority: rather, power dynamics exist between groups of people that regulate and discipline bodies to keep them docile. His seeming disregard for the issue of sexual difference is consistent with his strategies of thinking in terms other than the polarities of the masculine and the feminine. Given that the construction of sexuality around sexual difference has been a tool of subjection for centuries, his suggestion for a different emancipatory strategy aims towards a redefinition of the body and of the spaces it occupies.
The ‘underside’ of visual and textual representations celebrate ‘all the violence, deception and inhumanity’ that would otherwise attempt to pacify themselves, and us (Didi-Huberman, 2005).
