From Passive Victims to Politicized Subjects: Exploring Visual Representations of Refugees Women

Abstract

Considering representation as a political and incomplete process, this paper aims to explore the visual representation of refugee women in three ways. First, I present a historical overview of the traditional media representation of refugees by focusing on the shifts in the figure of the refugees shaped by Western socio-visual imagery (Bleiker, 2018; Chouliariaki & Stolic, 2017; Johnson, 2011). Second, I critically explore the power imbalances embedded in visual documentation practices building upon Ariella Azoulay’s new political ontology of photography. I explore photography as a set of relations between individuals within a photographic moment and/or other moments of engagement with images. I move beyond what photographs show by focusing on how they function in the world (Azoulay, 2008). Finally, I examine Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer’s series of portraits of women affected by the refugee crisis called Between These Folded Walls, Utopia (2017-2020- Fotografiska). This project shifts the grammar of the sensible through structures that blur the line between fiction and reality to question the lack of or inappropriate representation of refugee women through a non-traditional narrative. I discuss this alternative representation, building on T. J. Demos’ approach to documentation practices as a site of negotiation where the political is reinstituted into an aesthetic framework. Creative projects have the potential to articulate subjects' agency and reinvent “artistic possibilities of political engagement” (Demos, 2013, p. xxi). By considering the historical tradition of framing refugees as de-politicized subjects, I conclude Cooper and Gorfer’s project creatively contest and reinvent documentary practices, framing refugee women in a space of political resistance.