Male Gaze and Racism — Page 8:
36 The matrix was based on the existing research on racist practices during the European colonization of Australia. (Gascoigne; Mosse; English, Van Toorn) It reflected the findings of Australian and American scholars on the importance of the Enlightenment discourse for the constitution of a pre-scientific racism based on the observation of indigenous corporeality. The matrix was no mere head-birth of a German historian in search of racist texts, but reflected the particular importance of external evaluation of indigenous bodies for the assessment of indigenous culture before 1860. In short, I tried a discourse analysis of contemporary white statements, in the sense of "happy positivism", which Foucault demanded in "L'Ordre du Discours".
37 One of the results of this study was that racialized discourse in Australia occurred in two phases, one before 1800 and thereafter. The pre-1800 discourse displayed a rather neutral image of the indigenous peoples. The discourse between 1800 to 1860 turned out to be an almost continuous condemnation of the Aborigines, which marked the transition to the implementation of a genocidal policy of relocation and dispersal. The indigenous population emerged from these sources as a collective that had no human properties.
38 In her introduction to "Bodies That Matter" Judith Butler described the constitutive Other as abject body that resides in the unlivable and uninhabitable zones of social life "which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the 'unlivable' is required to circumscribe the defining limit of the subject's domain" (Butler 3). Butler thus borrowed Foucault's definition of biopower. Biopower constituted a form of knowledge or power, which is inscribed on the surface of the body and which becomes visible in the body, especially with a panoptic gaze regime. Groups and individuals outside the desired effects of biopower are "unlivable", which means they are threatened to be defined as unworthy of life. Agamben described them as homines sacri (Agamben), discarded to be killed without legal intervention by the government. I argued that it was thus possible to exclude indigenous people from the realm of human life and to render possible a policy of extermination and conquest, despite the lack of a biologist or Darwinist notion of racism., despite the lack of biologist definition of racism in pre-modern societies As much as I believe these results to be basically valid, as oversimplified they are. By searching for the racist gaze in the sources, the result was predetermined in some way, according to the Gospel of Matthew 7:7 "seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you". If the gaze of the beholder is not cast unilaterally, but the beholden can counter his gaze, it must be asked whether there are texts or pictures in which the indigenous stand up to the European gaze or recast it onto the voyeuristic spectator.
39 This is more likely in instances that are not part of a continuous narrative or a movie, in snapshots analogous to the state of a still or a frozen image of a movie. Hence, an analysis of the gaze regime in the context of the early history of racism should focus on sources that have the status of snapshots. (Virilio 55) Thus, travel descriptions as pure text have to be excluded and one would have to concentrate on what has been conceptionalized as a "viscourse". This is a concept coined by Karin Knorr-Cetina. Knorr-Cetina defined viscourse as follows: "The concept of ‘viscourse’ is the interplay of visual images and their integration into an ongoing communicative discourse" (247).
40 It is relevant for our purpose here that "visual images continually produce the unity and scientific coherence of the field" (247). I would like to borrow her concept of viscourses and associate it with Foucault’s notion of discourse. (Siegfried Jäger, cited in Adelmann 100) A viscourse analysis therefore aims at the capturing the visible in its qualitative bandwidth, but also the media strategies and procedures with which the expanded field of the visible can be expanded or restricted.