The veiled woman’s unreciprocated gaze frustrates and aggresses the colonizer

Evidence

This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer. There is no reciprocity. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself. The Algerian has an attitude toward the Algerian woman which is on the whole clear. He does not see her. There is even a permanent intention not to perceive the feminine profile, not to pay attention to women. In the case of the Algerian, therefore, there is not, in the street or on a road, that behavior characterizing a sexual encounter that is described in terms of the glance, of the physical bearing, the muscular tension, the signs of disturbance to which the phenomenology of encounters has accustomed us. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 153

Categorization

• XREF: The seeing-without-being-seen dynamic parallels Fanon’s phenomenology of colonial spectatorship elsewhere; connects to gaze theory in decolonial thought.