Visibility as a Concept

Overview Statement.
What does visibility mean? How is it linked to respect and action?

Is being visible, as a woman, a step toward social justice?  Given that women often are visible, very visible in fact, as objects, it would seem to take more than visibility to get images that do other than please the men who are their intended audience.  So what else does it take?

Many women in surfing have talked about needing better or different kinds of images — wanting to see women surfing and not modeling, wanting to see how people really look with their different kinds of bodies.  Improved images certainly move us in a better direction. But we can and should do much more as activists to think through what is at stake here.  How does visibility lead to respect or action?  Surf culture’s use of women as objects, girls-in-bikinis, sells so many magazines and videos and clothing items because the history of looking at women as objects is a thoroughly normal practice people learn from Western art and everyday media.  This normal practice involves a largely unconscious system of meanings, a whole “way of seeing.”  Objecting to these ways of seeing, criticizing them, involves its own system of seeing.  We might call this other perspective “feminist ways of seeing” — involving critique of so-called “normal” perspectives as well as involving a sense that another way of thinking about or visualizing women is possible.  When we imagine that difference, or see in feminist ways, we imagine other futures.

Part I. Decolonizing Ways of Colonial Seeing, Journey Cycles of the Boonwurrung

What about “ways of seeing” that begin with Country?  Might we call these decolonial ways of seeing, indigenous ways of seeing?  We gather on the Country of Boonwurrung, First Nations People of Australia.  We are grateful for the Welcome to Country extended to us and acknowledge that sovereignty over their lands has never been ceded.  We being our “homework” with stories of the Boonwurrung, from Narweet Carolyn Briggs and Louisa Briggs.  Through honoring these stories we pay respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and commit to being part of reconciliation processes that include respect, recognition, learning, and indigenous self-determination.

A copy of this book will be available at the Institute meeting.  For information and copies of the book, please refer to the Boon Wurrung Foundation.

Briggs, The Journey Cycles of the Boonwurrung (brief excerpt)

Part II. Placing Ourselves Again.
Fiona Capp, “Returning to the Water,” Excerpt from That Oceanic Feeling (2003)

This brief excerpt from the memoir of Fiona Capp (who will be an Institute participant) tells a tale of a woman who thinks maybe her surf days are in the past, when she was younger, but she’s trying go return . . . she’s hopes she is wrong about being “done.”  As does the above reading of Boonwurrung Country, Capp tells a story about the place we meet — of Torquay, Frankston, Bells Beach, Melbourne, but from a perspective embedded in surf culture.  Capp puts us in local geographies, narrating a kind of water based homecoming tale.   Years ahead of most surf memoirs and far more literary and politically engaged, That Oceanic Feeling is a must read for surf women.

Capp, Returning to the Water (2002)

Part III.   Workshop in Feminist “Ways of Seeing”

This section puts together several brief YouTubes that teach about a) art activism b) feminist photography and c) a classic conceptual work from the art historian Peter Berger.

a) Guerrilla Girls.  These activists are anonymous and have done actions all over the world, though based mainly in the US and New York City, to reveal the exclusiveness and male domination in museums collections and art institutions.  They are funny, provocative, and post outrageous posters with titles like “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist.”  Then under that title (to show the absence of attention to women’s art)  “Working Without the Pressure of Success.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uKg7hb2yoo (7 min)

b) Feminist Photography.  This is a YouTube that teaches about feminism as a movement and focuses on the problem of women as object vs. women as subject in photography and art.  A professor, Sybil Williams at American University, discusses the female body and how bodies carry stories that tell tales about functioning in patriarchal society. Bodies force us to think about liberation in visceral ways. Bodies are stages for liberation.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0d53rEzBlY  (10 min)

c) Peter Berger, Ways of Seeing: The Male Gaze (1972) BBC Series

Peter Berger was a Australian-born American Sociologist who created a 4-part series with the BBC about how seeing happens.  Through a survey of Western art history, he teaches that seeing art is anything BUT spontaneous or natural; it’s trained, even if we are unaware of the training, and the training involves “ways of looking.”

Episode 1 is extremely informative as general context for how we come to see.  The particular episode for the Institute talks about ways of seeing that signal a male gaze looking at a female image.   The first 15 minutes of the YouTube will introduce you to ideas that became classic foundations of feminist thought.  Sophisticated and insightful, don’t be put off by the 1970s look of things.  Berger’s thinking informs feminist theories of the visual today.

Lines often quoted from Berger that define the problem of the gaze and its impact on women:

–“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
–“A woman is always accompanied by an image of herself except when she is quite alone and perhaps even then. . . when she is walking across the room, when she is weeping at the death of her father.”
–“From earliest childhood . . . how a woman appears to others, especially to men, is of crucial importance to how she thinks about the success of her life.”
–“A nude must be seen as an object in order to be a nude” (otherwise it a naked body).