Taking a stand from the periphery: negotiating and resisting the white gaze in public images of Black women’s civic protest

This essay utilizes the iconic photograph of Ieshia Evans at the 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge, LA to complicate dominant understandings of iconicity in relation to racial icons. We argue that Evans's photograph became iconic because it tapped into a visual grammar of respectability marked by an aesthetic of demureness. We urge critical and visual scholars to look to what we call the iconic periphery, a discursive realm of potentially oppositional or counter-hegemonic images that circulate in abundance at the margins of iconic photographs, to find a radical aesthetic with the potential for social and racial justice.