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Developing a Good Seeing Eye/I. Exploring the limits and possibilities of photo-elicited subjectivities. Kakali Bhattacharya University of Georgia.
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Developing a Good Seeing Eye/I Exploring the limits and possibilities of photo-elicited subjectivities Kakali Bhattacharya University of Georgia “While all photographs are relics of the past, the living can take that past upon themselves giving all photographs a living context, a continued existence” (Berger, 1980, p. 57). View
Why Emancipate? You cannot take hold of itBut you cannot lose it In not being able to get it, you get it When you are silent, it speaks When you speak, it is silent. (Minh-ha, 1989, p. 96). Fix or Free Meaning? Posturing & Reflecting Discursive Influences Emotional Fluidity
I soon started to lose the comfort of language with which I once spoke. For I could not state that there is no truth or situate truth at its multiplicity and perpetuate an untroubled grand narrative of such multiplicity. Trace Back Fix or Free Meaning?
The visual, in our view never comes ‘pure,’ it is always ‘contaminated’ by the work of other senses (hearing, touch, smell), touched by other texts and discourses, and imbricated in a whole series of apparatuses – the museum, the academy, the art world, the publishing industry, even the nation state – which govern the production, dissemination, and legitimation of artistic productions…The visual… is ‘languaged,’ just as language itself has a visual dimension. (Mirzoeff 2002, p. 55) Trace Back
I stared at my data for hours and wondered what I was doing to my data to construct knowledge across such hurtful binaries where I produced India as a backward savage country and US. as a progressive country responding to the needs of Indian female participants successfully. I had to look at power operating in relations, accept that people are multiply advantaged and disadvantaged, and that people navigate strategically through multiple imposed and chosen subject positions. Trace Back Trace Back More Posturing
“We never just look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves” (Berger, 1972, p. 9). “Stated in its simplest form, we are proposing that visual data should be thought of not in terms of what the camera can record but of what the eye can see” (Emmison & Smith, 2000, p. 4). Trace Back Trace Back
Could it be because I was too disappointed with the way Indian nationalist and religious discourses treat Indian women? Could it be because I was appalled when I read that a rapist in India gets less punishment than a gay person participating in mutually consenting relationship? But aren’t there issues in U.S. that trouble me? Aren’t we witnessing a systematic oppression of women both at home and outside? Aren’t we witnessing violence against women everyday in the news in such frequency that it feels like an all American sport? Trace Back MoreEmotions
Don’t I cringe when people continue to treat me as an Indian cultural specimen asking me about my supposed arranged-marriage, dowry, or when they ask if I can cook them a typical Indian dish? Trace Back
Being educated in three different colonizing educational systems, I am aware of the influence of colonialized and decolonizing discourses that shape the way I process the world around me. More Discursive Influences Trace Back
I didn’t attend to the discomfort of my own positioning in U.S. as a female minority, a transnational feminist, conducting work on other transnational women. This is a complex position to be in and I cannot separate what is going on in the world and my feelings about world events as something that happens outside of my research, especially when I am conducting research on transnational flows and the material conditions of women’s lives affected by such flows. More Discursive Influences Trace Back
My binary worldview between the oppressor and oppressed soon became challenged. “I/i can be I or i, you and me both involved. We sometimes includes, other times excludes me ... you may stand on the other side of the hill once in a while, but you may also be me, while remaining what you are and what ‘i’ am not” (Minh-ha, 1989, p. 92). Trace Back
I could not speak for others. I could only say what these concepts do for me. How do they help me make sense of the world? What kind of knowledge does it produce for me and how do I question the complicity of such knowledge? When emancipatory frameworks of feminism established and valorized my need for social change, I felt conflicted. On one hand, I was ready to work towards social change. However, on the other hand I questioned the authenticity of my voice and position to emancipate “Others.” Trace Back WhyEmancipate?
My decolonizing work began when I stopped feeling the need to parrot other scholars to establish my perspectives. Trace Back WhyEmancipate?
I was making someone else’s work foundational, a grand narrative, instead of deconstructing or exploring the limits and possibilities of such work. Trace Back