In the Agony of Returning the Gaze: Ghazaleh Hedayat and the Construction of Intersubjective Dialogue

“Physical pain has no voice, but when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story,”(Scarry 1985, 3). By documenting an act of bodily endurance in a video named the Untitled, Ghazaleh Hedayat, an Iranian artist, gives her pain a voice to tell a story. A story that is unconventional and does not confirm to the stereotypes formed about Middle Eastern women. Hedayat captures her self-portrait in the Untitled, featuring her blank and blinkless gaze at the viewer. By gazing without blinking for almost seven minutes, Hedayat experiences bodily endurance. This painful performance leads to flowing tears from her eyes. However, her facial features do not show any sign of physical suffering. Hedayat in Untitled deals with the issues of the Western visual regime, the imperial gaze, and female subjectivity. Drawing on phenomenological readings of film studies and feminist theories of subjectivity and the gaze, my paper discusses how Hedayat works are at the limit of her corporal tolerance to destabilize the secure position of the holder of the gaze. I also examine how she engages the viewer and herself in constructing subjectivity through an embodied experience. How does she challenge the reception of her work in terms of the art of marginalized artists and how does she establish intersubjective dialogue with viewers?