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Sophia Is Still White . . . So Is Knowledge: Reflections on Visuality, Dialogic Possibilities, and the Limits of Continental Feminism

I am fascinated by the relationship between image and word, images and knowledge practices. Which images go with what words? What words speak about which images? How does the intertwining of words and images affect our embodied selves? What violence does it inflict? What pleasures? What ethical stances does it promote or undermine? “Visuality,” as theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff reminds us, is an early-nineteenth-century term that means the “visualization of history” (Mirzoeff 2011, 2). Visuality is the complex of information, images, and ideas that aims at conferring authority to the visualizer—it is what creates the norm, what authorizes how things ought to be, how they ought to look. The operations of visuality aim at classifying and categorizing, separating groups, and, most importantly, at normalizing such separation at the level of the aesthetic. Visuality constructs the real. We could say that visuality fixes the real in the way that chemical processes fix the image in a photograph—the slice of time and of the world captured for all to see, and, as Susan Sontag would say, for aggressive purposes (Sontag 1977). In other words, images matter. Let us consider a particular image, Philosophy: Philosophy is pastel-colored, contemplative yet sensual (note her bare breast as she holds her chin in deep thought), and charming, and divine—and