Believing Is Seeing

Abstract

Empirical research on both whiteness and masculinity has paid little attention to how white men actually see race and gender. This article combines data gathered from a set of twenty-six intensive interviews and three photoethnographic interviews, along with poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory, to explore the different ways white men visually interpret race and gender within particular social contexts. From the data, I offer a theoretical model called “the matrix of vision” that addresses how the visual field is constructed within discursive, structural, interactive, and geographic contexts. This article highlights how the field of vision is especially susceptible to making white men feel racialized and/or gendered. It contributes to more recent research on whiteness that presents the constructed character of white identity formation. It also adds to visual sociology literature by highlighting photographic work done by the respondents themselves and how visual sociology can contribute to nonvisual data.