The Oppositional Gaze and the Undoing of Colonial Optics: Dayna Danger and Nona Faustine
Written by Ava Jane Szollosy, Concordia University
Edited by Sophie Hill
Revealing the body is never a neutral action. As artists utilize the physical body in their works, they both emphasize their humanity while simultaneously taking up space. More importantly, the further the body is revealed, the more vulnerable the sitter becomes to the cannibalistic gaze of the viewer, especially in context of the bodies of racialized individuals. Through their work as artists, Dayna Danger and Nona Faustine harness the body and the visual language of opacity to deconstruct colonial narratives. Dayna Danger’s Self-Portrait (2019) (Fig. 1) collectively works with opacity and the body to center desire and pleasure rather than historical traumas. In Nona Faustine’s They Tagged the Land with Trophies and Institutions from their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse (2013) (Fig.2), the representation of contemporary realities for Black people is expressed through both a performative and dramatic juxtaposition of phallic architectural infrastructures, as well as her own naked body and Black skin. Both photographers reject presumptions of shame while subverting the visual language of photocolonialism, including faciality, frontality, and centeredness. Danger and Faustine do not objectify or dehumanize the Indigenous or Black body as photocolonialism does; rather, they illustrate agency in their self-fashioning related to bell hooks’ theory of the oppositional gaze.[1] This paper explores how these artists appropriate the visual language of colonial photography to critique and resist the cannibalistic gaze of the viewer. Thus, they reassert agency over their own marginalized bodies.
Figure 1. Dayna Danger, Self Portrait, 2019. Photograph, 60 × 75 in. (152.4 × 190.5 cm). Art Volt, Montréal.
Foregrounding my research on the artworks’ challenge of the colonial gaze is an understanding of the ‘cannibalistic gaze’ as a representation of the historical fetishization of Black and Indigenous bodies when consumed for the pleasure of the white colonial viewer. Art historian Amelia Jones interprets the gaze as a construct that positions women’s bodies as “objects of scopophilic or fetishistic voyeuristic pleasure, [whereby] the female body in Western culture connotes ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’.”[2] Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s conception of intersectional identities further complicates this gaze when the cross-roads of the self (ex., sexuality, gender identity, race, disability, class, wealth, etc.) act alongside systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination.[3] Further, the cannibalistic gaze assumes the role of consumption toward the bodies of racialized individuals; an inherently violent act as the consumer strips agency from, and objectifies the sitter. This is where the discourse of opacity (our second key term) becomes exceedingly relevant.
Opacity considers how subjects negotiate visibility by blurring or exposing their physicality and personality, allowing the artist to exert agency over the viewer’s gaze through their use of opacity. According to Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the right to opacity aligns with the right to be accepted as different without needing to be understood, making legibility its opposite.[4] Opacity is the resistance to transparency and the existence of complex, multifaceted identities to protect one’s culture and personhood from simple interpretations, misinterpretations, and mythos.[5] Being opaque is accepting that one is not required to fit neatly into the colonial categorization to generate truth. [6] Largely, opacity offers the opportunity to have agency through the plurality of choice and identity, rather than being overpowered by dominant colonial perspectives.
The cannibalistic gaze and opacity engage with ethnographic photography, a nineteenth-century practice that visually enforces racial hierarchies through objectification and identification. Per British art historian Julian Stallabrass, “in the ethnographic model, identity is uncertain but the agency is denied”.[7] Many ethnographic photographs lack any form of identification, including name, community, or location. The sitter is reduced to the photographer’s stereotypical understanding of their culture without the opportunity to self-fashion. Ethnographic photography is also connected to photography’s use for surveillance, classification, and control that historically aided in the practices of the slave trade, assimilation, and colonialism.[8] Examples of ethnographic photography are visualized in Edward Curtis’ romanticized documentations of Indigenous communities (1896-1930) and Joseph T. Zealy’s daguerreotype Slave Portraits (1850). These images reflect a mode of image-making that often narrowly constructs the identity of race by depicting elements of hardship in marginalized (or racially marginalized) communities. Danger and Faustine similarly employ a decolonial approach to subvert objectifying visual histories, reclaiming cultural identity in their own art.
While ethnographic photography involves the fictitious creation of racial hierarchy and the documentation of racial differences, colonial photography weaponizes frontality, faciality, and centrality, removing the sitter’s agency and erasing their subjectivity. Photography also has the power to document suffering, thus making violence visible in the medium. It is equally important to question what the photographer chooses to leave invisible; a conscious reading of photography’s ‘truth value’ is essential when considering the intentional manipulations of the artist upon the image.
As Indian scholar and literary critic Homi Bhabha suggests, “An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness.”[9] This fixed way of seeing strives to govern the circulation of images surrounding minority groups narrativized by the white colonial photographer. The aforementioned cannibalistic gaze can only survive when ‘otherness’ is embodied as a fixed form of identity. Meanwhile, Danger and Faustine re-appropriate racial stereotypes to subvert colonial narratives using the absolute authority granted by self-portraiture.
Dayna Danger is a Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, Métis-Saulteaux-Polish, visual artist. Their Self-Portrait—part of the artists’ series Kinship masks (2017)—is a bust portrait of the artist, with their upper body entirely naked and an intricately beaded black mask concealing their face. [10] Each mask, made of matte black beads adorned with black lustre emblems, represents over 300 hours of collaborative labor in leather making, design, pattern drafting, and beading. Beadwork is a practice central to Indigenous cultural identity: honouring elders, depicting histories and stories, and embodying community healing. The achromatic nature of the mask contributes to Danger’s uncovering of the contemporary dichotomies of tradition by opposing the colorful floral designs of Métis beadwork.[11] Throughout the Kinship Masks series, Danger photographs their mostly Queer and Indigenous friends wearing the beaded fetish masks. The photographs are intentionally large to take up space and reaffirm Indigenous presence. The image thus deliberately works against the settler colonial myth of the ‘Vanishing Indian.’ Author and historian Patrick Brantlinger describes this “extinction discourse” as a European imperialist method found in literature, art, advertising, and cinema that presumes the ‘inevitable’ disappearance of Indigenous people, whether from the spreading of disease or culturally from assimilation.[12] This mythology aimed to justify the decline of Indigenous populations from the methods of colonization used against them and appease Western consciousness.[13] Sherry Farell Racette, a First Nations (Métis/Timiskaming Algonquin/Irish) feminist scholar, writes that “the most damaging and persistent aspects of photo colonialism have been its nostalgic celebration of ‘vanishing races’ and the authority given to its representations.”[14] Danger subverts such acts of ‘vanishing’ through representing the Indigenous body as resilient against the Canadian government’s control, exclusion, and misrepresentation.
By joining the Indigenous cultural practice of beading and BDSM/kink masks, Danger reappropriates the sexualized object and counters the colonial oppression of sexuality and gender. According to Métis Indigenous Governance scholar Madeline Burns, the use of normativity and shame to define sex and gender represents a Western colonial “attempt to deteriorate queerness and positive spiritual relations with sex, gender, and sexuality.”[15] While Burn’s scholarship provides an interesting insight into decolonization, sovereignty, and Two-Spirit and Queer identity, her focus on Qwo-Li Driskill’s conception of “Sovereign Erotic” may warrant critique given recent allegations of falsely claiming Indigenous identity.[16] Nonetheless, Danger’s photograph illuminates these histories of oppression, politics, and erasure, while also seeking to foreground Indigenous joy, power, sex, and sexuality.[17] Furthermore, Danger states that identifying themselves as a Two-Spirit artist who engages with Queer identities highlights that they are creating work “for them,” thereby increasing visibility for other marginalized Two-Spirit individuals. The Kinship Masks embodies the theory of refusal whereby the mask ultimately evokes an opaque barrier that prevents the white viewer’s consumption of the body.[18] These masks directly play with notions of power and disempowerment, where context is lost in the erasure of faciality.[19]
While the face reveals identity, it can also be harnessed for dramatic effect, giving value and mood to the image. According to Photography Historian David Bate, “facial expressions signify a repertoire of ‘states,’ indicating the potential mood of a person wearing them.”[20] The artist's choice to blur or remove the faciality corrupts the process of spectatorship, reducing access to personhood. The opaque quality of Danger’s faciality thus coincides with Glissant’s framing of opacity as the right not to be understood and the right to define oneself to “displace all reduction.”[21]
Concurrently, Danger’s masks engage with kink as a space for community healing and gender expression without shame. The leather mask is an object of fetishization that increases anonymity and depersonalizes the wearer, while simultaneously evoking power dynamics between the submissive and dominant partner. Likewise, Danger’s photograph creates a complex power play between the sitter and viewer, subverting the visual language of colonial photography through the erasure of faciality. According to British Art Historian Kobena Mercer, “There is a supplementary code of portraiture which ‘humanizes’ the hard phallic lines of pure abstraction and focuses on the face — the ‘window of the soul’ — to introduce an element of realism into the scene.”[22] Danger works against the visual aesthetics of portraiture outlined by Mercer by deliberately obscuring or removing the presence of the face. The white viewer’s cannibalistic gaze is rejected when it is not offered the vulnerability of expressing humanity and identity; rather, one is offered an opaque understanding of the sitter, where identity becomes almost unattainable.
Despite the removal of faciality in Self-Portrait, the presence of the oppositional gaze forefronts an assertion of agency and dominance. bell hooks’s theory of the oppositional gaze is tied to a Black person’s right to ‘look,’ drawn specifically through her and other women’s experiences as Black female spectators. The culture of punishing Black gazes is deeply rooted in slavery, whereby the act of looking was inherently dangerous for those who were deemed lesser than or ‘Other.’ The oppositional gaze is summoned out of an “overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire” which “opens up the possibility of agency.”[23] This theory can also be applied to analyzing other minority groups who have faced similar oppression, resulting in the stripping of identity and personhood. For Indigenous people, the oppositional gaze is prevalent in colonialist practices of assimilation and dehumanization. Danger’s returned gaze is direct, assertive, and self-possessed, highlighting their awareness of the audience and dominance over their photographic representation. As Burns observes, “reclaiming sexuality is a decolonial and sovereign practice.”[24] Danger expresses sovereignty in their sexuality while illustrating how reclamation is performed in direct opposition to the dehumanizing discourse of colonization that sought to strip Indigenous people of their agency. Danger’s nakedness expresses a celebration of their own body and sexuality, while their direct gaze is used to take back authority beyond the vulnerability of nudity.
Figure 2. Nona Faustine, They Tagged the Land with Trophies and Institutions from Their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse, NYC, 2013. Photograph, Inkjet Print, 40 × 60 in. (101.6 × 152.4 cm). Undercurrent Projects, New York
Nudity and opacity are also prevalent in Nona Faustine’s They Tagged the Land with Trophies and Institutions from their Rapes and Conquests, where the artist’s naked body is contrasted against the architectural backdrop of the Tweed Courthouse (built between 1861 and 1881). For reference, in 1991, the African Burial Grounds, the largest colonial-era cemetery for Africans, were rediscovered in parts of New York City, including the grounds of the Tweed Courthouse.[25] Dating back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, groups of enslaved African people would congregate near the grounds where the City Hall of New York City is found today. With nearly 20,000 burials estimated by archaeologists in this seven-acre plot, evidently, the land was used by enslaved individuals for nighttime rituals. As the city grew, developments began on top of these cemeteries, leaving the African Burial Grounds largely forgotten. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, excavations of skeletal remains began. The remains indicated that these slaves had suffered from physically taxing labor and malnutrition, with approximately 40% of the burials being infants.[26] Today, the former New York County Courthouse, now known as the Tweed Courthouse, is considered a historic monument of the city and a familiar space for judicial proceedings. Through her research, Faustine understands that there are deeply disturbing histories embedded in the lands of New York City, and her work aims to reawaken these histories in the contemporary context.
In Faustine’s image, the abnormally large, phallic white pillars dominate the courthouse, while the deep wood-toned door behind nearly blends into her skin. Faustine rejects the visual language of colonial photography by appearing nude except for bright white heels — referencing church-going fashion as a symbol of Black women and Black Americans — her body off-center, face obscured, and gaze turned away. [27] As she aggressively pushes against the pillars, viewers question the dynamics of power and authority found between Faustine, a Black woman, and the historical structure. While ethnographic photography previously functioned as a dehumanizing and objectifying force for Black subjects, Faustine deploys photography to illustrate an intervention against the powerful forces of White Supremacy and slave history intertwined with the architecture.
This photograph comes from her series White Shoes (2024), dominated by images where Faustine is represented with a composed or neutral face while existing naked in public areas. These spaces are intertwined with the histories of slave auctions, African burial grounds, slave-owning farms, and the docking of slave ships. The series consists of forty photographs taken between 2012 and 2021, illustrating how forgotten and erased histories remain in plain sight. These site-specific works are taken across New York City, being that it was “built upon legacies of enslavement in New York—one of the last Northern states to abolish slavery.”[28]Alana Pockros states that this series “forces us to pay attention and to ask more questions” about the spaces that surround us and the tragic histories to which they might have contributed.[29] Thus, Faustine reveals how altered physical spaces can still evoke generational trauma, as the surroundings of Black Americans remain constant reminders of historical wounds. Faustine illustrates the potential for reclaiming authority in self-determination through the physical and metaphoric interventions her photographs and performances depict within these spaces.
Considering the structures of opacity, Faustine’s nakedness provides an unobstructed and non-obscure rendering of her body. Notably, being clothed in contemporary representations of the Black body can counter the racist and oppressive fetishization seen in the aesthetics of colonial photography that utilized muscularity, skin, and shine as indices to the Black body’s ‘objecthood.’ Clothes on the Black body are a form of subversion as outlined by Kobena Mercer in her discussion of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography catalogs Black Males (1983) and The Black Book (1986). Mercer notes that nudity facilitated racial and sexual fantasies about the Black male body.[30] Although she is discussing Mapplethorpe’s work specifically, I argue that these specific visual codes and their implicit hypersexualization and objectification of the Black body are relevant to this paper, considering the historical context of slavery and slave photography addressed by Faustine. The Zealy daguerreotypes of Slave Portraits — commissioned by Swiss-American zoologist Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz for his study on “race” — exemplify these representations, whereby male and female enslaved people are pictured naked, thus vulnerably exposing skin and genitalia. Their nakedness also functions as an indicator of violence, revealing scars, burns, gashes, and malnutrition. The presence of these images in the contemporary context provides visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects. They also illustrate the historic and violent mistreatment of Black bodies offered as commodities, catering to the cannibalistic gaze of the white viewer. Not only did the Zealy Slave Portraits remove the sitter’s access to self-fashion, but they also constructed Black bodies as mere objects for scientific study.
Faustine, on the other hand, places her naked body at the forefront to criticize this culture of objectification. While photographing herself naked in broad daylight on New York City streets, Faustine inevitably draws attention, yet her exposed body subverts the white viewer’s cannibalistic gaze. Opacity is the right to resist—the power to choose what to reveal or conceal in expressing complex, multifaceted identities. For Faustine, the lack of opacity is the right to self-determination through the reappropriation of historical practices that stripped Black individuals of their agency, identity, and clothing.
According to hooks, “Spaces of agency exist for Black people, wherein [they] can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what [they] see.”[31] Indeed, the oppositional gaze serves as a site of critique and resistance against the dominant power structures that subordinate Black people; non-violent yet weaponized, as seen in Faustine’s photograph.[32] Faustine consciously looks away from the viewer, yet her body language does not suggest vulnerable availability. Rather, the artist’s fearsome gaze is directed toward the structure almost as if her physical strength becomes more powerful through harnessing the oppositional gaze. Not only is Faustine pushing against the domineering weight of a colonial structure, but she is also reversing the visual qualities of colonial photography. Faustine’s agency is clearly displayed in her gaze, thus changing relations of power and highlighting the potential for resistance against colonial dominance.
In both Danger and Faustine’s photographs, moments of resilience emerge as the naked body becomes a means of self-determination and resistance against power structures seeking to subordinate Black, Indigenous, and Queer communities. Both artists appropriate the visual qualities of colonial photography, including faciality, frontality, and centrality, to subvert notions of colonial assimilation and reaffirm their agency. This effect is achieved through the oppositional gaze, which contrasts and challenges the viewer’s cannibalistic gaze and photography’s tendency to erase agency and identity. These images powerfully represent a shifting cultural landscape in which opacity becomes a tool for reclaiming agency. As the works of Nona Faustine and Dayna Danger so importantly portray, photography serves as a medium through which Black and Indigenous artists reclaim visual narrative power—simultaneously reshaping their stories, challenging colonial histories of erasure, and asserting their rightful presence in the contemporary visual landscape on their own terms.
Endnotes
[1] This paper extends the scholarship of Dr. Julia Skelly from her 2024 lecture-based course “Studies in Contemporary Photographic Art,” which examines photographers who challenge photography’s colonial legacy and its early use in producing racist ethnographic imagery.
[2] Amelia Jones, “The Rhetoric of the Pose: Hannah Wilke and The Radical Narcissism of Feminist Body Art,” in Body Art/Performing the Subject, (Minneapolis, London: Minnesota University Press, 1998): 153.
[3] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” TedWomen, October 2016.
[4] Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation, (University of Michigan Press, 2010): 189-190.
[5] Glissant, “For Opacity,” 194.
[6] JaBrea Patterson-West, “Julie Mehretu: On Black Abstraction, Futurity and Opacity as a Space of Liberation,” Flash Art 334, 17 May 2021.
[7] Julian Stallabrass, “What's in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography,” October, no. 122, (Fall 2007): footnote 52.
[8] Julian Stallabrass, “What’s in a Face?” 2.
[9] Homi K Bhabha, “The Other Question…,” Screen, Volume 24, Issue 6, (Nov-Dec 1983): 18. as cited in Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishish: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994): 176.
[10] Danger, “Kinship Masks.”
[11] Neale McDevitt, “Meet Dayna Danger: McGill’s Mellon Indigenous Artist in Residence,” McGill Reporter, 15 February 2022.
[12] Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1830–1900, (Cornell University Press, 2003): 5.
[13] Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 5.
[14] Sherry Farrell Racette, “Returning Fire, Pointing the Canon: Aboriginal Photography as Resistance,” in The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada, eds. Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011): 79.
[15] In 2023 the Tribal Alliance Against Fraud determined that “Paul Edward” Qwo-Li Driskill had no American Indian ancestry found, yet Driskill insists that they are Cherokee, Lenape (Delaware) and Osage. TAAF asked Oregon State University to remove Professor Driskill from their position due to academic fraud. This discovery was made after Burns completed her research. More information about the TAAF discovery can be found on their website: https://tribalallianceagainstfrauds.org/%22qwo-li%22-driskill.
[16] Madeline Burns, “Reclaiming Indigenous Sexual Being: Sovereignty and Decolonization Through Sexuality,” The Arbutus Review, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020): 33.
[17] As stated by Danger in an interview with the Harbour Collective BIG Small Talk (2024), “We live in a dominant male gaze society. Even if it gives me great fuel, I am not responding to that; I make work for other people like me. My practice comes from the funny, joyful, laughing place; my politics come in afterward.”
[18] Sasha Kucas, “BIG Small Talk with Dayna Danger,” Harbour Collective, 14 February 2024.
[19] CBC Arts, “Queer (Self) Portraits: Dayna Danger,” Youtube video, June 27, 2017, 1:41 to 1:56.
[20] David Bate, “Seeing Portraits,” in Photography: The Key Concepts (Bloomsbury, 2016): 91.
[21] Glissant, “For Opacity,” 190.
[22] Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994): 179.
[23] bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation, ch 7 (Boston: South End Press, 1992): 116.
[24] Burns, “Reclaiming Indigenous Sexual Being,” 28.
[25] Annabel Keenan, “‘Once you know the history, you see it everywhere’: Nona Faustine on Uncovering New York’s Uncomfortable Past,” The Art Newspaper, 1 May 2024.
[26] New York Preservation Archive Project, “African Burial Ground,” 2025.
[27] Alana Pockros, “Nona Faustine: She’s Putting Herself in Their Places,” New York Times, March 8, 2024.
[28] Brooklyn Museum, “Nona Faustine: White Shoes,” 2024.
[29] Pockros, “Nona Faustine: She’s Putting Herself in Their Places.”
[30] Kobena Mercer, “Reading Radical Fetishism,” 173,.
[31] hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” 116.
[32] hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” 116.