Seeing Things Differently. - Review - book review

A second and related theme is subversion. We might draw a parallel here to urban parks built during the late nineteenth century. Originally intended to pacify the immigrant masses through a therapeutic exposure to nature," they are now periodically transformed into sites for cruising and gay desire. In the same way, the queer viewer temporarily inhabits, and re-maps, the space of the straight image. Jose Esteban Munoz offers a fascinating re-reading of the "queer charge" (168) in Larry Clark's images of white adolescent boys (in Teenage Lust, Tulsa, Kids, and The Perfect Childhood). For his part, Clark refuses to admit even the possibility that his relentless fascination with teenage male sexuality (which reduces women to the status of on-lookers or "props") may somehow reflect on his own desires. Perhaps he fears that this admission would pose an intolerable threat to his own "bad boy" self-fashioning, as Munoz describes it. Mark A. Reid's analysis of the various readings that have developed around Robert M applethorpe's images of black men also addresses the question of subversion. Reid relates the beatification of Mapplethorpe as a kind of saint of gay art to the relative neglect suffered by artists of color such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

Kaucyila Brooke describes the difficulties she encountered in trying to research Berenice Abbott's images of the lesbian subculture of Paris in the 1920s. She includes a letter from Abbott, who vigorously resisted Brooke's attempt to read the images in connection to her sexual orientation, in which Abbott, sounding a bit like an exasperated Dr. McCoy, insists, "I'm a photographer not a lesbian!" (suggesting precisely the kind of elision of the sexual dimension of photographic production that the book is at pains to overcome, as if the positions of "lesbian" and "photographer" were mutually exclusive) (130). At the same time, the exchange between Brooke and Abbott suggests some of the problems (ethical and well as hermeneutic) that the kind of reading "in" to the image practiced by Deitcher raises when the photograph in question is not an anonymous, nineteenthcentury ambrotype of two unknown men, but the work of a living artist.

Other essays in the book explore Yasumasa Morimura's photographic recreations of "masterpieces" of Western art in his attempt to overcome the "desexualized Zen asceticism" of the Asian male ("if Asian men have no sexuality, how can we have homosexuality?" (238)) and Elizabeth Stephens's staged photographs of dykes on bikes, re-coding the image of the biker outlaw and the mechanic's calendar girl to satisfy butch and femme desire. But this discourse of subversion and mimicry is at the same time a product of oppression; a language of citation and counter-citation, of reading, writing, and looking between the lines, necessitated by the homophobia of the dominant culture. It is a form of wisdom, of creativity, yes, but at a price, and we (especially straight critics, historians, and artists) would do well to recognize its origins. Among the more provocative questions that Bright's book raises is, Can we imagine a queer visuality or identity outside of this repression? The collection raises an additional question . Just who is being "subverted"? As the queer writer Jane DeLynn has noted in her book Bad Sex Is Good: Fiction and Essays (1998), the reason why so much "gay art seems designed to tweak the noses of the Jesse Helms's of the world [is] because who else really cares?" (196).