Chapter 6 makes it clear that definitions, categories and expertise have not ended interpretive issues. Definitions are disembodied. All forms of violence and suffering, their definition and recognition remain relational in reality, born out of a labyrinthine complexity – in terms of how they are constructed, communicated, filtered and understood. Preconceptions of who is deserving of recognition, the requisites for social identification, moral commitment or collective empathy reveal this to be the case. Social science takes suffering to be (inescapably) intersubjectively, textually and sensorially understood – so judicial determinations must also go beyond the technical and doctrinal. The chapter’s discussion on temporality continues the theme of sensing. It examines temporal registers in the recognition of torture – exploring the questions: how does time feature and function in juridical understandings of torture? This discussion on time adds to the kaleidoscopic catalogue of sense-centric registers and reasoning operating in the anti-torture field – illustrating it to be a device of inclusion and exclusion.

Chapter 7 considers the severity threshold in the Act. Examining how the law establishes severity, it asks whether the threshold can be justified – particularly given that the Act’s standard definition of disability (which is based on functional deficit) applies a lower threshold of substantiality. It argues that the severity threshold is out of step with the lived experience of visible difference and explores whether the concept of perceptive discrimination can be used to bypass this problematic threshold. This chapter also addresses the problem of complex conditions – those which include both an aspect of disfigurement and of function – and concludes that, mirroring academic debate about the rigidity of models of disability, the law’s approach is not flexible enough to encompass all types of disabling barrier holistically.

Chapter 3 explores the identity strategies that La Fulana and Free Gender have employed in their activism. The chapter puts forward and defines two different identity strategies that organizations employ: commensurability and visibility. The first half of the chapter shows how Free Gender strategizes lesbian identity to be commensurate with other important social and political identities such as “woman,” “African,” and “community member.” Doing so allows Free Gender to advance its goal of eliminating violence against lesbians in their local community. The second half of the chapter shows how La Fulana develops a strategy of lesbian visibility to increase the salience of lesbian identity relative to other social identities. This strategy aims to correct the social and political erasure of lesbians in public that persists after the acquisition of citizenship rights. Overall, the chapter adds to the literature by explaining the kinds of strategies organizations may use when explicitly strategizing multiple identities at once, and how these strategies address the limitations of legally inclusive citizenship.

What does it mean “to tolerate” in a post-Christian and post-secular state? This chapter argues that antecedents of contemporary conflicts over diversity in Europe can be found in early modernity, specifically in early modern practices of toleration, which impacted on both the belonging and the visibility of minorities. New forms of intolerance pertain to the position of religious, ethnoreligious, and sexual minorities in public life, echoing the concerns of the public visibility of minorities inhering in historical Christendom. The political articulation of certain groups as “other” to “the nation” is increasingly mediated through constitutional repertoires, such as constitutional revision and amendments, developments in the hermeneutics of constitutional concepts, or pseudo-constitutional behaviour. This chapter introduces the main themes: tolerance and intolerance, constitutionalism, secularisation, and their significance across the liberal–illiberal divide.

The introduction raises the question of how one ought to understand the challenge of God’s invisibility/visibility in the Fourth Gospel with regard to its stated purpose: ‘These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.’ Scholars and theologians have often taken God’s invisibility to be ‘absolute’, in the sense that it describes an immaterial, eternal God whose deity is invisible by nature. While John claims that no one has ever seen God, it also describes God as incarnate in Jesus Christ, the one in whom the Father may be seen. The introduction shows that scholars have not yet satisfactorily defined the nature of divine invisibility in John nor reckoned with the import of this important theme for John’s purpose. It proposes that, according to John, God must become physically visible in Jesus in order for belief to obtain.

A brief conclusion summarizes the argument as a whole, asserts that God is physically visible in Jesus’s body, considers the impact of this conclusion on Johannine scholarship, and suggests further areas of research.

The chapter explores the contemporary erosion of trust in human vision and its profound implications for the epistemological foundations of modern democracy. Ezrahi identifies the current skepticism surrounding the reliability of visual perceptions, asserting that this skepticism undermines the essential fictions and rituals sustaining claims of visibility and transparency in democratic systems. The notion of “visual commonsense” is introduced, referring to the façade concealing the complexities of vision as a source of knowledge and information about the physical and social worlds. He also asserts the active role of the human eye, brain, and sociocultural context in shaping perceptions. Ezrahi contrasts Einstein's dismissal of commonsense with the significance of commonsense facts in democratic political discourse. The argument is that there is a significant gap between the current epistemic condition and that of liberal democracies’ heyday. Ezrahi argues that technological innovations, instead of standardized reality, deepen cultural, religious, ideological, and gender diversities in visual perspectives. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that, in the midst of visual disarray, the human eye possesses the power to both disorient and guide, reflecting the complex interplay between perception, imagination, and the changing landscape of modern democracy.

This chapter examines the intricate relationship between visibility, epistemology, and political power in modern democracies. Based on Ezrahi’s previous research on the development of modern democratic visual culture and the impact of the scientific revolution on reshaping the role of human perception in knowledge acquisition, the chapter underscores the role of visibility in shaping democratic epistemology. It emphasizes how visibility, in conjunction with individualism, democratic causality, and the concept of public facts, form the epistemological foundations of democracy. Visibility plays a key role in objectifying politics, which allows citizens to be informed, make judgments about their leaders, and participate in the political process. The chapter highlights the importance of visible public facts as a form of political currency for government criticism and accountability. The chapter acknowledges that the common belief in the accuracy of visible perception, equating observables with reality, has given democratic citizens unwarranted confidence in navigating the political landscape. Paradoxically, these unfounded beliefs align with democratic norms and principles. The chapter suggests that the erosion of these illusions has contributed to the erosion of democratic values.

Tax-information reporting is an essential element of the tax compliance system. Despite the power of tax-information reporting to maximize the IRS’s ability to collect taxes owed, these rules also contain significant gaps. High-end taxpayers can often earn their income through transactions that do not require a third party to file tax-information reports with the IRS. This chapter demonstrates how the activity-based approach to information reporting often allows high-end taxpayers to engage in noncompliance with the tax law, while other taxpayers face significant automatic IRS scrutiny. It also shows that the government’s approach to tax-information reporting applies almost exclusively to specific activities, ranging from methods of earning income to designated transactions. This approach is consistent with the government’s design of other tax compliance rules that apply to certain types of activities, such as the use of tax shelters, offshore bank accounts, and transactions lacking economic substance to avoid tax liability.

Instrumental readings are of course vital when making weather observations, but non-instrumental ‘eye observations’ (such as cloud amounts and types) and brief notes (such as short weather diary entries) help to help build a more complete picture. This chapter sets out how to include these types of record, along with documentation regarding the occurrence of fog, snowfall, thunderstorms and other elements, in a practical and useful series.

Regularisation has been part of the French state's policy response to immigration since World War II. Since the end of labour migration in the mid-1970s, one of the key routes to legal immigration in France has been through regularisation by local administrations. These generally discreet practices reveal an intimate knowledge on the part of street-level bureaucrats of this supposedly invisible population. Alongside this generally low-key process, the French state has also organised more visible ‘mass regularisations’, notably in 1981, 1991 and 1998. This chapter explores the political dynamics shaping the French government’s approach to both ‘exceptional’ and ongoing regularisation. Through archival and interview data, it shows how the French authorities at the local and national level developed an array of strategies to manage the visibility of its regularisation policies.

How might attention to the mechanisms of stage licensing help us to think specifically about the politics and aesthetics of on- and off-stage space in eighteenth-century drama? This essay addresses this question by looking at John St. John’s The Island of St. Marguerite, a musical afterpiece first staged at Drury Lane in November 1789. Using a spectacular retelling of the ‘Man in the Iron Mask’ story to mount a barely coded staging of the storming of the Bastille, this play was the first attempt by one of London’s royal playhouses to respond directly to the early events of the French Revolution. But the two Larpent manuscripts for Island show just how much had to be expunged and changed before the examiner of plays would license it. In particular, this essay argues, the cuts and annotations of the examiner (and possibly also John Philip Kemble, Drury Lane’s acting managing) disclose an institutional discomfort with the off-stage spaces – besieged walls, subterranean prison cells, sites of execution – that the audience are never taken to and yet must picture for themselves if what is actually unfolding before them is to make sense. Attention to these manuscripts thus takes us towards a deeper understanding of the play of visibility, of the texture of sensory and extra-sensory experience, in the Georgian theatre.