This essay looks at how Sierra Faye's Photograph, "Comfort in the Undiscovered" (2011), demonstrates hyper-visibility with the use of black paste covering the model's skin. The black paste, applied in layers, prevents the view of the subject's authentic skin. In my reading, the paste represents the blackness that gets constructed in white imaginations. White power then imposes that imagination on to black subjects. With the help of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) and bell hooks’ Black Looks (1992), I discuss how Faye's photograph shows how white gazes distort the views of Black women and femmes, making it so that we cannot be fully seen.
A literary and cultural analysis of Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye (1970) that looks at Pecola’s experience with Mr. Yacobowski, the scene where she asks for candy and is mis-seen by the white immigrant store owner. How he sees her affects how she sees herself. Morrison reveals how this mis-seeing gaze is a part of white supremacy's circuit of continued anti-blackness. This scene also troubles GWF Hegel’s "process of recognition" by showing how Hegel’s process is truncated for Black girls in relation to white supremacists. Mr. Yacobowski sees Pecola and truncates the process by refusing to fully see her personhood and humanness. Going further, this scene shows how young Black girls are trained, through this process, to understand themselves by how they are defined by the white, dehumanizing gaze.
