"Privileged Looking": The Politics of Visuality and Countervisuality within Ethical and Sustainable Fashion Movements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay critically evaluates ethical and sustainable fashion discourses, highlighting their inadvertent complicity in perpetuating the neocolonial and neoliberal frameworks they purport to challenge.Utilizing visual culture and post-colonial studies, the analysis focuses on the Western/imperial gaze within ethical fashion imagery, particularly in depicting women garment workers in Bangladesh.The essay argues that this gaze often constructs narratives of aid and rescue, akin to international development regimes, leading to a form of "privileged looking" as theorized by Shawn Michelle Smith.I compare Westernproduced images within ethical fashion spaces, which often depict a superficially positive portrayal of garment workers, with self-produced visual representations by these workers that embody "countervisuality" -a concept developed by Nicholas Mirzoeff.This countervisuality resists and disrupts hegemonic narratives, positioning women workers not as passive subjects but as active agents of resistance.The study also draws upon Susan Sontag's reflections on the context and setting of visual spectacles, illustrating how ethical fashion imagery can reinforce rather than challenge dominant social orders.The essay implores the ethical fashion sector to adopt a more introspective and genuinely transformative approach.This involves confronting and seeking to dismantle the intertwined structures of racial capitalism and white supremacy, rather than merely reproaching the conspicuous symptoms of a capitalist order while facilitating its visual facade of benevolence.The essay posits that true solidarity with garment workers requires moving beyond superficial sympathy to a genuine engagement with their struggles and narratives of resistance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.096 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".