Political Visual Literacy

Political visual literacy considers visuals and visualities as layered artefacts and practices, into which different techniques for achieving “visual truths” have been enfolded. Often, these “visual truths” serve oppressive ideologies, first and foremost racialisation, which is mostly absent from visual politics. By employing a political visual literacy we will recognise the harmful ‘visual truths’ that framed these practices and technologies as they developed and their enduring presence in contemporary visual practice. This article argues for the need for such a political visual literacy in visual politics and develops a methodology that interrogates two aspects of the implication of race and visual practice: the white-centrism of visual technologies and the racialised origin of transphobic visualities in automatic gender recognition (AGR) technology.