Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Ghalya Saadawi

Thesis: Visibility is a Trap – Queer Opacity as Resistance Strategy

July 2025

Abstract

This thesis investigates how visibility, though central to queer activism, has also functioned as a tool for institutional regulation and control of marginalized identities. Engaging with the work of Nancy Fraser, Asad Haider, and Nicholas De Villiers, it critiques contemporary recognition politics that emphasize identity coherence, self-disclosure, and clear representation—requirements that can limit the emancipatory potential of such politics and entrench existing power structures under the guise of inclusion.

In response, the study proposes opacity as a mode of resistance that goes beyond mere invisibility to challenge the very conditions under which identities are rendered knowable and thus governable. Through Édouard Glissant’s notion of the “right to opacity,” Tiqqun’s idea of “zones of offensive opacity,” and De Villiers’s concept of queer opacity, the thesis outlines a political stance that embraces illegibility and resists fixed identity categories and normative frameworks of understanding. In doing so, it explores how opacity can disrupt the soft regulation of identities in liberal democracies and challenge the surveillance logic of logistical capitalism.

This analysis extends into contemporary art, examining whether abstraction—particularly queer abstraction as theorized by David Getsy—can function as a mode of queer opacity. While abstraction holds potential as a resistant strategy, it remains vulnerable to institutional co-optation, where radical gestures are reabsorbed into familiar aesthetic systems. Rather than affirming abstraction as such, the thesis proposes the development of queer opacity as a genre in its own right—emerging from the refusal to meet the epistemic demands of liberal inclusion, and instead valuing silence, illegibility, and contradiction.

Author: Alva Roselius