On In/Visibility

Abstract

How does a racialized and feminized body encounter and negotiate its in/visibility in white western academia? In this article, I adopt an autoethnographic approach to respond to this question, drawing on Ahmed’s (2007) conceptualization of whiteness, Puwar’s (2004) understanding of racialized and feminized bodies as ‘space invaders’, and a conceptual exploration of silence/speaking out in relation to visibility and invisibility, through personal narratives of women scholars of colour in white western institutions. I then reflect on a series of my own personal encounters as a brown woman scholar in white spaces in Australia, as entangled in deliberate acts of speaking out, of seeking visibility. Through this narrative of vulnerability, conceived as a site of social and political resistance (Montoya 1994, 27; Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016), I aim to show some of the myriad and complex ways in which processes of visibility and invisibly, silence/silencing and speaking out, are stitched up with operations of power, vulnerability, and resistance in spaces of whiteness.