Jill H. Casid
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816646692
- eISBN:
- 9781452945934
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816646692.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Theorizing vision and power at the intersections of the histories of psychoanalysis, media, scientific method, and colonization, this book poaches the prized instruments at the heart of the so-called ...
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Theorizing vision and power at the intersections of the histories of psychoanalysis, media, scientific method, and colonization, this book poaches the prized instruments at the heart of the so-called scientific revolution: the projecting telescope, camera obscura, magic lantern, solar microscope, and prism. From the beginnings of what is retrospectively enshrined as the origins of the Enlightenment and in the wake of colonization, the scene of projection has functioned as a contraption for creating a fantasy subject of discarnate vision for the exercise of “reason.” The book demonstrates across a range of sites that the scene of projection is neither a static diagram of power nor a fixed architecture but rather a pedagogical setup that operates as an influencing machine of persistent training. Thinking with queer and feminist art projects that take up old devices for casting an image to reorient this apparatus of power that produces its subject, the book offers a set of theses on the possibilities for felt embodiment out of the damaged and difficult pasts that haunt our present.Less
Theorizing vision and power at the intersections of the histories of psychoanalysis, media, scientific method, and colonization, this book poaches the prized instruments at the heart of the so-called scientific revolution: the projecting telescope, camera obscura, magic lantern, solar microscope, and prism. From the beginnings of what is retrospectively enshrined as the origins of the Enlightenment and in the wake of colonization, the scene of projection has functioned as a contraption for creating a fantasy subject of discarnate vision for the exercise of “reason.” The book demonstrates across a range of sites that the scene of projection is neither a static diagram of power nor a fixed architecture but rather a pedagogical setup that operates as an influencing machine of persistent training. Thinking with queer and feminist art projects that take up old devices for casting an image to reorient this apparatus of power that produces its subject, the book offers a set of theses on the possibilities for felt embodiment out of the damaged and difficult pasts that haunt our present.
Jessica Lawless
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670826
- eISBN:
- 9781452947181
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670826.003.0019
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter considers the question of how the radical use of the camera can translate into concrete political activism that effects social change. A way to do this is to stop confining the ...
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This chapter considers the question of how the radical use of the camera can translate into concrete political activism that effects social change. A way to do this is to stop confining the definition of political art to protest art and, conversely, to recognize the sublime in openly political artworks. It is also necessary to shift the concept of oblique to stealth. Oblique can be likened to passing, whereas stealth, if one is being conscious and strategic, can contribute to the dismantling of normative gender and sexuality in explosive ways. This is not just a rhetorical move. It is queering an approach to video making, queering how one looks through the camera, and queering how one sees what is captured. To be queer, one must become conscious of one’s location. Queering one’s approach to making video is not to become queer in one’s sexual practices but to become conscious of looking 45 degrees off center, askew and somewhat bent.Less
This chapter considers the question of how the radical use of the camera can translate into concrete political activism that effects social change. A way to do this is to stop confining the definition of political art to protest art and, conversely, to recognize the sublime in openly political artworks. It is also necessary to shift the concept of oblique to stealth. Oblique can be likened to passing, whereas stealth, if one is being conscious and strategic, can contribute to the dismantling of normative gender and sexuality in explosive ways. This is not just a rhetorical move. It is queering an approach to video making, queering how one looks through the camera, and queering how one sees what is captured. To be queer, one must become conscious of one’s location. Queering one’s approach to making video is not to become queer in one’s sexual practices but to become conscious of looking 45 degrees off center, askew and somewhat bent.
Nguyen Tan Hoang
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670826
- eISBN:
- 9781452947181
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670826.003.0021
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter explores the representation of race and sexuality in experimental documentaries produced by gay Asian men in the United States, Canada, and Australia in the mid- to late 1990s. These ...
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This chapter explores the representation of race and sexuality in experimental documentaries produced by gay Asian men in the United States, Canada, and Australia in the mid- to late 1990s. These include Slanted Vision by Ming-Yuen S. Ma (USA, 1995), 7 Steps to Sticky Heaven (USA, 1995) by Nguyen Tan Hoang, Tony Ayres’s China Dolls (Australia, 1997), and Wayne Yung’s The Queen’s Cantonese (Canada,1998). These films seek to contest the feminization and desexualization of Asian men in gay visual culture by presenting self-consciously performative, sexually explicit material, which acts as an urgent counterpornography. A central component of the reeducation of desire for these films’ intended gay Asian male audience is the goal of replacing the so-called wrong, misguided desire for white men with a supposedly more empowering desire for other Asian men, such a shift ostensibly signals a concomitant shift in masculine agency from passive sexual object (the Asian boy toy) to active sexual subject (the politicized agent). The chapter argues that this politically correct lesson fails to account for desires and identifications that cannot be so easily disciplined, especially those desires that embrace bottomhood and femininity. In other words, such a reeducation ends up arresting the play of desire and marginalizing a gay Asian male subject’s desire for submission and domination—in effect, a move that curtails a gay Asian subject’s choice and sexual possibilities.Less
This chapter explores the representation of race and sexuality in experimental documentaries produced by gay Asian men in the United States, Canada, and Australia in the mid- to late 1990s. These include Slanted Vision by Ming-Yuen S. Ma (USA, 1995), 7 Steps to Sticky Heaven (USA, 1995) by Nguyen Tan Hoang, Tony Ayres’s China Dolls (Australia, 1997), and Wayne Yung’s The Queen’s Cantonese (Canada,1998). These films seek to contest the feminization and desexualization of Asian men in gay visual culture by presenting self-consciously performative, sexually explicit material, which acts as an urgent counterpornography. A central component of the reeducation of desire for these films’ intended gay Asian male audience is the goal of replacing the so-called wrong, misguided desire for white men with a supposedly more empowering desire for other Asian men, such a shift ostensibly signals a concomitant shift in masculine agency from passive sexual object (the Asian boy toy) to active sexual subject (the politicized agent). The chapter argues that this politically correct lesson fails to account for desires and identifications that cannot be so easily disciplined, especially those desires that embrace bottomhood and femininity. In other words, such a reeducation ends up arresting the play of desire and marginalizing a gay Asian male subject’s desire for submission and domination—in effect, a move that curtails a gay Asian subject’s choice and sexual possibilities.
Scott Herring
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816677252
- eISBN:
- 9781452947440
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816677252.003.0015
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
RFD quarterly (once referred to as “Rural Fairy Digest”) was one of the first queer journals to extend the non-normative intersectional politics of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) to nonmetropolitan ...
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RFD quarterly (once referred to as “Rural Fairy Digest”) was one of the first queer journals to extend the non-normative intersectional politics of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) to nonmetropolitan U.S. audiences. This chapter extends recent historical scholarship on 1970s lesbian and gay US print cultures to analyze the anti-urban politics of RFD’s early stylistics. It offers an aesthetic archaeology of what one initial contributor, Donald Engstrom, later termed RFD’s “separatist fag community,” and what one historian of regional US cultures, James T. Sears, sees as the quarterly’s “anarcho-effeminism.” Extending their findings, the chapter explores how a particular version of gay male urbanity began to reprint itself as a normalizing print style in 1970s glossy magazines, and how RFD, alongside rural feminist journal Country Women, responded to this historical packaging with oppositional stylistics of its own.Less
RFD quarterly (once referred to as “Rural Fairy Digest”) was one of the first queer journals to extend the non-normative intersectional politics of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) to nonmetropolitan U.S. audiences. This chapter extends recent historical scholarship on 1970s lesbian and gay US print cultures to analyze the anti-urban politics of RFD’s early stylistics. It offers an aesthetic archaeology of what one initial contributor, Donald Engstrom, later termed RFD’s “separatist fag community,” and what one historian of regional US cultures, James T. Sears, sees as the quarterly’s “anarcho-effeminism.” Extending their findings, the chapter explores how a particular version of gay male urbanity began to reprint itself as a normalizing print style in 1970s glossy magazines, and how RFD, alongside rural feminist journal Country Women, responded to this historical packaging with oppositional stylistics of its own.
