In pursuit of power I read the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. From within the boundaries of the prison, Foucault laid bare the operations of power that lie rooted in a ``culture of visibility''.

Imprisonment technique depend on making prisoners continuously visible, constantly scrutinised by an ``audience'' of prison guards who watch their every move. Techniques of surveillance become methods of control through which power is exerted upon individuals.

Prisons aside, I was riveted by the idea of visibility as diabolic. And thought immediately of those who are constantly visible, or actively seek visibility.

Witness Prince Charles.

At the ripe age of fifty when he should have known better, he began to woo the media to set right his own image. Perhaps he wanted to compete with his dead wife.Her constant visibility must have been galling for a prince brought up to think of himself as the centre of the world.

But his move into the limelight boomeranged. As part of his birthday treat an uncomplimentary BBC programme has skewered him right and proper and commented on everything from his relations with his mum to the almost non-existent chances of his mistress becoming his queen.

I don't want to waste sympathy on the spotlighted imprisonment of Prince Charles. Nor upon men who have wronged others. But both the prince and the prisoner have pointed to another figure who has been shafted in the disfiguring light of visibility. The common-or-garden Male.

Men, like princes, have been privileged in hundreds of different respects but most particularly in the way their lives have been open to constant view. From Freud forward the male life cycle has been interminably written about, commented upon, pulled and pushed apart, till there isn't a shred of that life we don't know.

I think Foucault had apoint when he said ``visibility is a trap''. Visibility ``fixes'' its subjects through constant observation that echoes the surveillance techniques of the prison.

The danger lies in the ``watchmen''/audience. Imagine an audience that is always there. It would become a fusion of critic and prison-guard.Like prison guards, admirers of men assess every gesture as appropriate, every statement as suitable, every appearance as correct -- or not. The arenas of appraisal may seem mundane or almost irrelevant -- gesture, voice, attitude. But reading Foucault made me understand how effective microscopic surveillance can be in generating compliance. The more actively judgmental an audience becomes the more it would fix Visible Men into roles it desires to see.

In the process an active audience creates its antithesis: the spotlighted, but pliant Visible Men. The thrill of standing centrestage would be tempered by the twenty-four hour audience who could turn privilege into persecution. In the end, the Visible Manwould be left with a mere illusion of power because real power would lie with the audience.

Foucault didn't offer a way out of the visibility trap. But there is a path that has been trodden and a map that can be drawn. And, perversely, I would look for both in the movements forged by feminists and gay activists who have ``come out'' from behind veils and closet doors.

What I see lying at the heart of feminist and gay activism is a refusal to accept their given location in the world. And a willingness to redefine and rewrite cultural scripts. ``Coming out'' from the wings are political steps that count in my eyes as a challenge and an affirmation.

This is the test and the invitation Visible Men need to accept to take their own political counter-step. Into invisibility. Perhaps for men the wings will be both sanctuary and fertile testing ground from which to mount their own liberation.

The writer teaches at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics