For stigmatized minorities, public visibility is a form of power

Evidence

I was reminded of an article I had recently read about piety among French Muslim women today. Jeanette Jouli, the author, explains that many pious French Muslim women attempt to render themselves visible to the world at large by donning the hijab or praying out in the open while at work or at school. They do so in an attempt to mark and claim a presence in the public sphere. “This hints at a typical feature of the struggle for recognition by minority and stigmatized groups,” Jouli writes. “Visibility is considered a source of power whereas its opposite, invisibility, becomes a sign of oppression.” — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 912

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the strategic visibility in Parable of the Sower’s survival logic and midwifery-record keeping in A Midwife’s Tale, where making oneself seen/tracked is a form of agency. — connects to: Oppressed persons first grasp their shared condition as being looked at from outside.
• ADDENDUM: Pairs naturally with the immodesty moral-panic article: the hijab as forced visibility and the veil as political signal are two sides of the same public-dress battlefield.
• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the common framing where invisibility is safe and visibility is dangerous: for the stigmatized, blending in is itself a form of erasure, and being seen becomes the political act.