This panel aims to complicate the critique of visibility that dominates queer and trans studies. While scholars working in these fields sometimes acknowledge in passing the benefits of the increased visibility of queer and trans people in public life and popular representation, by and large they treat visibility politics with suspicion because of its supposed promotion of assimilation, racial exclusions, commodification, and surveillance. Many queer and trans scholars quote Foucault’s aphorism from Discipline and Punish (1975), “visibility is a trap,” to indicate their anti-visibility position, a move that often takes the place of a concerted engagement with the affective, aesthetic, and political implications of visibility. When scholars do center visibility, they largely repeat the suspicious view, as in such diverse studies as Melanie Kohnen, Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television (2015), Mia Fischer’s Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State (2019), Reina Gossett et al. (eds.), Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017), and Carly Thomsen, Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming (2021).

At a moment when queer visibility is both historically unprecedented and under vigorous attack from a revanchist right, the time is ripe for a reappraisal of the scholarly view of visibility. Attending to three distinct moments in queer and trans representation during the postwar period and ranging across diverse genres (film, TV, and video gaming), this panel will help begin that reappraisal, demonstrating visibility’s actual complexity. Moderated by Ben Nichols, the three papers will run for twenty minutes each, leaving fifteen minutes for the audience and panellists to explore the implications of and connections between the panel’s “revisionings” of visibility.

Beginning with the mid-1960s, Guy Davidson’s “Chained Girls Coming into Hiding” problematises influential queer-theoretical arguments that lesbianism is “unrepresentable”. Davidson reads the pseudo-documentary Chained Girls (1965), which purports to make visible the hidden lesbian subculture. This cheaply made sexploitation feature, whose scenes are entirely staged, means to titillate its presumptive heterosexual male audience rather than present a serious account of lesbian lifestyles. Yet while the film barely bothers to conceal its own cynicism, it nonetheless mobilizes the investigatory impulse evident in ostensibly more serious contemporaneous documentary texts about America’s newly visible and inceasingly militant sexual minorities. The film paradoxically makes lesbianism visible even as it fakes its revelations. In so doing, rather than situating lesbianism as unrepresentable, this disreputable artefact offers a spin on Malcolm Bull’s argument about “coming into hiding,” whereby emancipatory energies render minority identities simultaneously visible and invisible.

Moving into the 1980s, Todd Reeser’s “Eyes/I’s: Documenting the Visible Field of the Trans Subject” will shift attention from how trans subjects are viewed (a popular preoccupation widely critiqued in trans studies) to how they themselves create regimes of perception and visibility. Reeser takes up two examples from French TV to consider what Jacques Rancière considers “politics”—not governments or laws but exclusion from creating “régimes de perception” in a national context. In the “Transsexuals” episode of the talk show Aujourd’hui Madame and Anne Gaillard’s documentary The Body of My Identity: Being Transsexual, actual eye exams put into question how cisgender French culture views trans subjects and closes them out from “perceiving and judging communal affairs.” In Gaillard, the main subject Marie-Ange is a practicing optician and repeatedly turns the gaze on the hypothetical gazer, visually questioning the health of the regime that gazes upon her daily. This reconfiguration of the visual field sidesteps contemporaneous French discourses that assert hegemony over trans bodies (medical, juridical, journalistic, biographic, etc.). This historically embedded approach, Reeser argues, opens up a horizon by which cisgender regimes of perception can be questioned in later decades.

Bringing us up to the present day, Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield’s “Portal and Portal 2, or Revisiting Opacity via the Epistemologies of the Closet and the Black Site" offers a challenge to a number of scholarly fields, from Black studies to queer theory, that have (over)valued “opacity” as if it is always a site of resistance. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, and Lauren Berlant, Cassemere-Stanfield uses a close reading of gender undecidability in the videogames Portal and Portal 2 to show that as opacity is itself motivated by a desire for transparency, it is constitutive of the very crisis it resists. That is, where surveillance and data capture produce precarious lives beset by threats of epistemological foreclosure, these systems first transform those lives into unclassifiable and otherwise obscured bodies whose illegibility occasions renewed investigation, pursuit, and capture.