How Do We Look?: Resisting Visual Biopolitics

Fatimah Tobing Rony's How Do We Look? explores visual biopolitics through transnational images of Indonesian women, highlighting their connection to discourses of primitivism, savagery, colonialism, exoticism, and genocide. It also showcases acts of resistance to these practices through film, writing, and photography.

Format: Hardback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 01 February 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

Fatimah Tobing Rony employs transnational images of Indonesian women to explore visual biopolitics, a concept that examines how visual representation shapes the importance of different lives. Rony delves into the mechanisms of visual biopolitics by examining two key examples: Paul Gauguin's 1893 portrait of Annah la Javanaise, a thirteen-year-old girl who was trafficked and found wandering the streets of Paris, and US ethnographic and documentary films. In each instance, the figure of the Indonesian woman is intricately linked to discourses of primitivism, savagery, colonialism, exoticism, and genocide. Rony also highlights acts of resistance to visual biopolitics in film, writing, and photography. These works, including Rachmi Diyah Larasatis' "The Dance that Makes You Vanish," Vincent Monnikendam's "Mother Dao" (1995), and collaborative films by Nia Dinata, challenge the normalized methods of seeing that perpetuate exploitation, dehumanization, and premature deaths among people of color. By theorizing the mechanisms of visual biopolitics, Rony sheds light on both the violent and vulnerable aspects of this phenomenon.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478013679