Feedback: “I have been enjoying your thoughts on visibility!”
adventures-in-asexuality
I have been enjoying your thoughts on visibility! I’ve often thought of it as kind of the ability to access narratives about yourself (or about other people, I guess, but my priorities here are inherently centered on people being able to find narratives about themselves, or about who they want to be) – a bit broader than just fiction narratives, including things like healthcare narratives or relative narratives or what you have. I have said the word ‘narrative’ too much.
( re: this post )
thanks for sharing your thoughts. 🙂 i’ve actually never re+ally thought of narratives or the ability to access them as visibility, but as representation…. but now that you mention it, i guess it totally is a form of visibility, just not in the way that i usually think of visibility…
…which i guess is part of the frustration that i have with usage of the word “visibility” in LGBTQIA advocacy etc– the fact that the word “visibility” itself is such a broad, multifaceted word that can be and is used to refer such a wide variety of different things even within a single community, even within discussions of a single topic as to almost essentially render the word meaningless because sometimes it’s hard to even guess at what someone is actually referring to when they say “visibility” because even within the context of its usage, sometimes that context could itself be said about many different things, not all of which the person in question may even be referring to…?
i don’t know…
it’s like how a black person– be they a single, token, fictional black character in an otherwise not black cast lineup or a single, black kid in a real-life class comprised entirely of peers who are not black– can be [hyper]visible in what i guess would be a more literal sense of the word? but that [hyper]visibility does not necessarily correspond directly to how much access (or lack there of) to narratives of people like themself that the kid, for example, has? even though there is arguably more correspondence regarding amount of access to narratives when in the context of black people who do or don’t see people like themselves represented in / by the token, fictional black character…………
again, i don’t know. i often feel like i’m caught up in semantics, making a big deal out of nothing, when it seems like i’m the only one particularly bothered by word usage / meaning, so i really appreciate it when others initiate or jump into the conversation. thanks again for sharing your thoughts.