That’s basic Foucault: the consideration of power as a force which destroys as well as produces, the force that says “no” as well as “yes, yes, more of that, yes.”
It’s the productive capacity of power that is in a sense its most terrifying, the “yes, and” of power, the coercion to confess, to express, to reveal in an effort to be visible, transparent (note the ironic proximity of transparency and invisibility).
Come to think of it, one can locate this awkward proximity between the call to transparency and the enforcement of invisibility in cultural considerations of minority difference. That which is different, unusual, unexpected - the queer subject, the subject of color, the disabled subject, the unintelligible differences that blend these positions together, etc (and what work this “etc” does) - is expected to submit itself to scrutiny. The unfamiliar body is presumed to invite inspection. One can witness this bizarre dynamic at work in the unsolicited touch of the normative: the uninvited stroking of Black hair (“it’s so cool!”), the invasion of queer bodies, trans* bodies, by demand, physical or verbal, accusatory or (more frighteningly) exclamatory, by demand of explanation, to give an account of one’s body (“why’s it look like that?,” “are you a boy or a girl?”) or desires (“Ew, how could you want to TOUCH a guy like that?”).
The social and cultural attention paid to minority difference, then, serves as an example of this violent dynamic: we will make you visible only that we might invade you, make you transparent. Transparency too close to invisibility, to disappearance. But we know the price of invisibility. It is dehumanity.
