https://aeon.co/essays/medieval-art-makes-the-body-a-site-of-theology-and-politics
Bodies were vehicles for theology, politics and hierarchy. They carried meaning before they moved. Our own visual culture is less gilded but no less structured. We continue to inhabit systems that distribute expectation unevenly across bodies.
The question is not whether we can eliminate classification. Human perception depends upon pattern. The question is whether we can recognise when pattern has hardened into presumption – when we mistake rehearsal for instinct, correlation for character, anticipation for fact. To recognise that perception is trained is not to abandon judgment, nor to deny the reality of danger. It is to admit that recognition is never purely instinctive. It is shaped by repetition, by the images and narratives that circulate long before any individual encounter. Awareness does not dissolve pattern, but it can interrupt the presumption that pattern is destiny.