Dr. Balbir Singh talk at McGill University

Dr. Balbir Singh will present "Opacity as Method: Contemporary Muslim Femme Print and Material Cultures," based on her first book manuscript. The talk is part of McGill University's Institute for Islamic Studies series “Gender Performance in Islamicate Contexts.”

In this piece, Singh centers the possibility of opacity as method as a way of situating contemporary Muslim femme print and material cultures. She situates the racial and colonial fascination of Muslim femininity and femme-ness as, on the one hand, heavily defined by practices of veiling or unveiling, and on the other hand, policed on quotidian, embodied, and statist levels through forms of surveillance. As a response to such forms of fixation and harm, Singh theorizes opacity and forms of cover—from privacy to redaction, from illegibility to counterveillance—as part of what she names the evasion of racial and colonial capture. Specifically, Singh reads the work of contemporary Muslim femme artists, including Assia Boundaoui, Baseera Khan, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, to describe the anti-colonial creative methods that deploy forms of opacity as vital to their respective practices. Following the lead of scholars in surveillance studies, Black feminisms, Asian and Arab diasporic cultural studies, and feminist and queer of color critique, Singh studies this artistic work as crucial to reorganizing both aesthetic and political strategies of seeing and sensing writ large.