Opinion: The Gaze That Liberates: Media, Memory, and Trans Women’s Narrative

This Women’s Day, media scholar and digital artist Medusa Iro challenges us to widen the lens of history. In this compelling opinion piece, she examines how the gaze—whether through a camera or an algorithm—can either erase or liberate trans women, and why their stories must be at the heart of the fight for gender justice.

In the haunting black-and-white stillness of Dr Peter Magubane’s photographs, South Africa remembers. During apartheid, Magubane risked life and liberty to document injustice, often concealing his Leica 3G camera in a loaf of bread, a milk carton, or even a Bible. These images were not simply records—they were acts of defiance.

His lens smuggled through brutality, capturing the truth the state fought to bury. Through him and those like him, we see the dignity of protest, the silent strength of Black women, and the reality of oppression. His legacy reminds us that media itself can be resistance.

On days of public remembrance and national reflection, such as this, Magubane’s photographs are often shared, reposted, and reframed to symbolise collective struggle. But these images are not merely ‘content’—they are ‘form’. And form, as the structuralist and poststructuralist traditions remind us, is not neutral. It shapes perception, encodes power, and defines what can be known. As Marshall McLuhan declared, ‘the medium is the message’—meaning the form of media itself is what truly communicates, not just its apparent content.

In this view, there is no content outside of form; even resistance must appear in form to exist. Roland Barthes’ notion of the ‘punctum’—that sharp emotional detail in an image that pierces the viewer—reminds us that meaning is not inherent in the object, but emerges in its form and reception. To remember is not only to show but to show through the right form.

On this National Women’s Day, as we commemorate the 1956 march of 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest pass laws, we must also ask: who has been pushed to the edge of the frame? But reality does not lie. Look closely: trans women are not outside the movement—they are in the frame. Because in every protest, every act of resistance, the body tells the truth. And who gets to police that body in the image? The movement must confront its own gaze.

Too often, transgender women—especially Black and refugee trans women—have been excluded from the very gender equality movements they helped build. Their bodies appear in the images, but not in the policy. Their labour is present, their voices erased.

Media, when used with integrity, can return erased stories to the archive. It can write bodies back into public consciousness. It can reshape social imagination. In the United States, nearly half of transgender individuals report employment discrimination, verbal harassment, and disproportionate poverty. Trans women of colour in particular face staggeringly high rates of violence, incarceration, and homelessness, even within progressive movements meant to include them.

This is where narrative power matters. French feminist Hélène Cixous wrote in The Laugh of the Medusa (1975): “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing…”

Trans women must write their bodies—not in the language of pathology, but in liberation. This includes transgender refugees, whose bodies and stories often carry the double burden of gendered violence and displacement. Their narratives are not only silenced by mainstream gender movements but also erased within migration and refugee discourses, where identity is too often reduced to documentation rather than humanity. Their narratives, their voices, their images must be seen and heard on their own terms.

The myth of Medusa provides a profound metaphor. Cast for centuries as a monster whose gaze turned men to stone, few recall that Medusa was a mortal woman, raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, and then cursed for the violation she endured. Her gaze became a shield, not a weapon—a refusal to be harmed again. When trans women reclaim the Medusa gaze, they do not freeze the world; they expose it. The Medusa gaze is the media. It does not beg to be seen—it demands it.

Media embodies that same gaze. Like Medusa, it does not ask for permission. It sees. Magubane’s images, though once hidden, forced the nation to look. His courage, and the courage of others who bore witness, made it impossible for the world to ignore the suffering of South African women. Today, we owe our collective memory to those who risked everything to show us the truth.

Yet memory must evolve. New generations do not simply inherit truth—they shape it. In our time, the camera is no longer hidden in a loaf of bread; it lives in every pocket. Media is no longer limited to print—it lives in digital waves, algorithmic codes, and generative engines.

Artificial Intelligence is now both archive and author. It can amplify voices or silence them; it can replicate bias or resist it. The same tools used for deepfakes and disinformation can also be harnessed by trans women and other marginalised communities to tell complex, nuanced, self-directed stories. But only if access, agency, and ethics are at the core.

The lesson of Magubane is this: the tool matters less than the truth it carries. Whether hidden in bread or coded in binary, our stories must be told with purpose.

On this National Women’s Day—and every day—let us widen the lens. Let us recognise that among those most marginalised are trans women who live in exile, fleeing not only misogyny and transphobia, but also state violence, familial rejection, and cultural erasure. Let us centre the trans women who have always been part of the struggle. Let us use every medium, from the silver halide of old cameras to the neural networks of AI, to honour the full breadth of womanhood. Because liberation is incomplete if it leaves anyone behind.

 

Medusa Iro is a Media Scholar and Digital Artist.