Making appearances: Women's oppositionality and the politics of visibility.

Abstract

The current model of visibility theory as it coincides with a resurgent interest in Foucaultian panopticism has prompted an inquiry into how spectacle and surveillance interact in establishing and perpetuating a gender-stratified power system. This dissertation considers the dynamic influence of the visible on the lives of complex female protagonists in three novels: <italic>Les liaisons dangereuses</italic> (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, 1782), <italic>La jongleuse</italic> (Rachilde, 1900), and <italic>L'enfant de sable</italic> (Tahar Ben Jelloun, 1985). Visibility theory provides not only a provocative critical perspective from which to study current and local struggles for power and representation, but also offers a new lens through which to look at sociopolitical inequities in literary and historical contexts. This dissertation therefore serves two interrelated aims: first, to consider both the manner and the degree to which the characters of Madame de Merteuil, Eliante Donalger, and Ahmed/Zahra can each successfully and surreptitiously procure personal gain, as knowing manipulators of their own visibility; and second, to apply visibility theory in separate readings of <italic>Les liaisons dangereuses, La jongleuse</italic>, and <italic>L'enfant de sable</italic>, thus illustrating the adaptability of visibility theory to literary criticism. I argue that readings of the politics and practices of visibility, as demonstrated through these specific textual examples, reframe ocularcentrism as not only an instrument of social control but also as a system vulnerable to subversion.