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The way we look matters : witnessing. trauma. perspectivism.

University of British Columbia

This began as a film project. We took cameras and queer actors on a filmed/photographed walk in downtown Vancouver to demonstrate that people who look queer receive harsh micro-expressions when they are in public space. The photos were taken in public space and the actors consented to having their images used for this project. This is using the same public photography method used by Hayley Morris Caffiero (professor of photography) in her project Wait Watchers, where she photographed herself in public space and captured the micro-expressions of members of the public as a provocative statement about the type of treatment that fat people experience in public. I wanted to use this photographic method with queer people to demonstrate how queer people are looked at in public, and I wanted to interview the actors afterwards using a photo-elicited interview method where we would review the footage together during a debriefing interview. After I experienced an inter-LGBTQ-community trauma, I decided to incorporate a deeper layer of auto-ethnography into the project and turn this into a story about how we all look at each other imperfectly, including ourselves, including me. It became a process for me to document and move through a phase of existential resentment towards hope. This work is intended as art. It is also intended to be provocative in order to prompt dialogue regarding the importance of the phenomenon of “looking at others” and “being looked at” vis a vis Gender and Power and Hope. I used an interdisciplinary/mixed methods approach: philosophical inquiry, poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, rhetorical analysis, auto-ethnography, photography, performance, conscientization and photo-elicited journalism. My conclusion is that the way we look does matter, but so does the way we talk about the process of looking, and if we lapse into dogmatic controlling behaviors in response to being looked at harshly, then we perpetuate harm. I also conclude that to some degree hope is an elusive, and mysterious, but nonetheless existentially, poetically, and even academically significant framework from which to perform inquiries about power and gender and witnessing.

Text; Moving Image

2020-05-11

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/74400

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/