Compulsory visibility and the infralegality of racial phantasmata

Abstract

I open this article by offering an exposition of Gilles Deleuze's theorisation on the figure of the phantasm. I then proceed to situate this figure within post-9/11 economies of racial profiling – focusing, in particular, on the Islamophobic mobilisation of the niqab in order to advance arguments premised on differentialist and culturalist racism. Drawing on the work of the British Iranian artist Reza Aramesh, I bring into focus the manner in which racialising somatechnologies are deployed in order to reproduce racist stereotypes and to foment cultural panics. I conclude by underscoring the structural violence that is at once produced and disavowed by Western liberal democracies in the face of unassimilable others.

Keywords:

• racial profiling
• whiteness
• somatechnics
• Islamophobia
• Arabophobia
• culturalist and differentialist racism
• terrorism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Michael Mucci for his generosity in allowing reproduction of the image of women in niqabs on a Petri dish. The author is also grateful to Reza Aramesh for his generous permission to reproduce his artwork. The author's readings of Reza Aramesh's images do not necessarily reflect the views of the artist. The YouTube image is reproduced with permission of Australian Associated Press.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Susan Stryker for coining the term “somatechnics”. For a detailed definition of this term, see the Somatechnics Research Centre website (http://www.somatechnics.org).