In my talk, I offered a re-examination of visual culture of Arab womanhood, from colonial portraiture to contemporary social media posts,  to “turn the gaze inward” (Rodríguez 2000) while simultaneously reflecting it back onto the viewer, interrogating how violence is embedded not in the women’s bodies but in the production, staging, and decoding of images.  Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) critical fabulation, Amira Jarmakani’s (2015) Marxist-feminist critique, and Ariella Azoulay’s autoethnographic approach, I engage the limits of colonial archive to “tell impossible stories” of unnamed women whose lives cannot be recovered through evidence alone.