Making appearances: Women's oppositionality and the politics of visibility

The current model of "visibility theory" as it coincides with a resurgent interest in Foucaultian panopticism has prompted an inquiry into how spectacle and surveillance interact in establishing and perpetuating a gender-stratified power system. This dissertation considers the dynamic influence of the visible on the lives of complex female protagonists in three novels: Les liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, 1782), La jongleuse (Rachilde, 1900), and L'enfant de sable (Tahar Ben Jelloun, 1985). Visibility theory provides not only a provocative critical perspective from which to study current and local struggles for power and representation, but also offers a new lens through which to look at sociopolitical inequities in literary and historical contexts.;This dissertation therefore serves two interrelated aims: first, to consider both the manner and the degree to which the characters of Madame de Merteuil, Eliante Donalger, and Ahmed/Zahra can each successfully and surreptitiously procure personal gain, as knowing manipulators of their own visibility; and second, to apply visibility theory in separate readings of Les liaisons dangereuses, La jongleuse, and L'enfant de sable, thus illustrating the adaptability of visibility theory to literary criticism.;I argue that readings of the politics and practices of visibility, as demonstrated through these specific textual examples, reframe ocularcentrism as not only an instrument of social control but also as a system vulnerable to subversion.