Invisibility and power in the digital age: issues for feminist and queer narratology. Issue 6 (3rd July 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Young, Tory
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 32:Issue 6(2018)
• Page Start: 991
• Page End: 1006
• Publication Date: 2018-07-03
• Subjects: Ali Smith -- Peggy Phelan -- feminist narratology -- identity politics -- gender; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1486546
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay examines the continued assumption that representational visibility equates to power, in the digital age. It considers the tension between the image as a form that captures what already exists and the image as a future possibility in the era of the mantra 'You cannot be what you cannot see' and growing recognition of gender fluidity. After re-examination of Peggy Phelan's reminder about the power of the unmarked, I turn to Ali Smith's 2014 How to be both, a novel with an interchangeable Renaissance narrative and contemporary story in a palimpsestic structure, to propose a formula that could be described as the becoming-simultaneous of narrative sequence . In conceiving the 'unnarrated' as both a gap in what was represented in retrospect in an existing storyworld but equally as a narrative future, I link the unmarked to political possibility, and conclude that you cannot always see what you can be.