Beyond the Privileged Status of Written Discourse: Visual representation as a research tool

Essential to this paper is the recognition of the "privileged status our culture accords written discourse", which is discussed against the background of "the variety of ways in which we represent our realities" (Chaplin, 1994, p. 277), the power of representations to influence perceptions (Jacob, 1989) and the ever-growing importance of communities of shared meaning (Delanty, 2002). Jenks' argument that "seeing and knowing have become perilously intertwined" is advanced, opening up for the study of visual representation, seen as "a compounding of strategies for knowing, desiring and for the exercise of power" (Jenks, 19995, p. 16). The systematic study of visual representation, or visual social science as it is called here, deals with the nature of "seeing" and knowing, in the recognition that "seeing" is culturally constructed, that the predominant "view of the cosmos from within modernity---epistemological, aesthic and literary... has been a masculine view" (Jenkes, 1995, p. 150).
Using visual representations the paper will investigare the manner in which the body is realised within the specific and historically shifting sociocultural context of Sweden today, illustrating in this manner the discrepancy between the offical discourse of gender equity and the "lived" discourse. Underlying the study itself is the premise that "even if representations of gender, like the discourses they reflect, are always unstable and fluid, they nonetheless operate within the parameters that are historically specific, which can allow them to be used as signifiers of that context" (Shail, 2001, p. 101). It is argued that this research shows the usefulness of visual representation as a means by which to study discourse, serving as a complement to the analysis of written discourse.