(en)Vision(ing) Otherwise: Queering Visuality and Space in Lefebvre’s Production

Abstract

This article develops and extends parallels between Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and contemporary queer thought, drawing out their shared themes of visuality, subjectivity, and differential space. For Lefebvre, the circuits producing vision, subjectivity, and space are inescapably ideological and suspect: The visual obscures social relations, dominates space, and fragments subjectivity. Yet there is still something to be said about the transformative potential of vision in Production. Although Lefebvre castigated vision as a hegemonic modality, and left the counterhegemonic potential of vision rather underdeveloped, a turn toward (queer) phenomenology can supplement Lefebvre’s politics of the visual and suggest pathways to a new vision for space, subjectivity, and the social. Here, I argue that the possibility of a different space and set of social relations, be it “differential” or expressly “queer,” relies on an alternative mode of visuality: a way of seeing that challenges dominant modes of representation, relationality, and meaning making in space. After considering the potentials of vision in Lefebvre’s account and those of queer phenomenologists, I turn to film to experiment with the potentials of a critical visual practice to queer subjectivity and space as we know it.