Seeing Things Differently. - Review - book review

Deborah Bright, ed. The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. London: Routledge 1998. 441 pp., 200 b/w and color ills. $85.

As Jerry Falwell's recent attack on the "gay subtext" in Teletubbies suggests, queer identity in our culture has a particularly close and complex relationship to questions of visual representation. Is that a television antenna on Tinky Winky's head or a gay pride "pink triangle"? Is Tinky holding a purse or just a "magic bag"? And what are we to make of the Teletubby fascination with wearing skirts? Falwell's decision to fixate on remarkably obscure (and perhaps nonexistent) signifiers of queerness in the Teletubbies, while such obvious examples as Xena: Warrior Princess captivate millions of children each week, tells us a great deal about straight, conservative fantasies of queerness as a discourse of subversion and seduction. It raises another question as well. Is there a specifically queer hermeneutics of the image? What are its conditions, and how is it different from either Falwell's homophobic paranoia, or, for that matter, from mainstream art historical methodologies? In her book The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, Deborah Bright provides an invaluable guide to the conditions of queer visuality in the specific context of photographic history and art practice.

Bright, a photo historian and artist who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, has combined a wide range of materials, including historical and archival studies, analyses of contemporary art activism, short stories, and an impressive selection of works by contemporary artists. Given this diversity, the writing throughout is fairly consistent, with relatively few lapses into excessively turgid academese. Though at eighty-five dollars, the hardback price is a bit steep, the book is heavily illustrated, with both black-and-white and color images. Among them are works by Lyle Ashton Harris, Rotimi Fani-Kaynde, Hanh Thi Pham, Sunil Gupta, Catherine Opie, and many others, making the book an excellent resource for courses on queer representation in general and contemporary art in particular. Contributing writers include Michael Anton Budd, Mark Alice Durant, Liz Kotz, Mysoon Rizk, James Smalls, and Alisa Solomon. The book also features a useful bibliography of sources on queer theory, photographic history, and visual culture.

Bright's introduction reviews some of the political and theoretical questions surrounding the staging of gay sexuality in the mass media, political discourse, and art. Bright challenges what she describes as misinterpretations of the performative theories of sexuality and identity associated with writers such as Judith Butler, which tend to view the assumption of sexual identity as a kind of open-ended ludic play. She points instead to the material and political forces that impinge on and constrain what might be termed the "privilege of performance." Bright is particularly concerned with diversifying the construction of queer sexuality to include vectors of class, race, and ethnicity. Thus the book includes essays and stories by Elizabeth Stephens, Paul Franklin, Linda Dittmar, Mark A. Reid, and Catherine Lord, among others, which do a superb job of outlining the complex effect of these forces.

One of the key points of articulation for a theory of queer visuality concerns the status of desire within intellectual discourse. Conventional art history, founded as it is on the myth of disinterested scholarship, must expel or suspend the desire of the historian, whose job it is to dispassionately situate the recalcitrant "work of art" within the already established narrative of art historical progress. This attempt to make the difference of the singular work intelligible within, or conformable to, the normative standard of artistic achievement, might be seen as particularly problematic for a viewer whose own identity is constructed against the grain of a hetero-normative culture.

David Deitcher's discussion of his relationship to an anonymous ambrotype of two (possibly) gay men from the 1850s. which opens Bright's book, offers a revealing meditation on this dilemma. Deitcher uses the image to explore both his own ambivalent relationship to academic inquiry ("queer men and women are justified in maintaining a certain skepticism regarding the historian's positivistic and empirical method") and the complex position of queerness in the nineteenth-century concept of "romantic friendship" which granted a "special dispensation" (29) to same-sex relationships. At the same moment, Deitcher is less concerned with the historical specificity of the image than he is with its ability to give him the pleasure of self-recognition. Here intrudes Deitcher's own desire to read in or into the image something more, which may or may not be borne out by the picture's manifest content: "I am drawn to the men in this photograph because their pose strikes me as courageous, even defiant. And yet this may only he projection on my part, a measure of how much I would like to find gay desire reflected in an artifact from the pre-gay past" (25). It is precisely the anonymity of the image, its lack of authorial and historical stability, which allows it to function this way. Thus Deitcher describes his particular attraction to "orphaned" pictures that exist both "in and out" of history (29).

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).

Who is the audience for queer art? Is it straight viewers whose consciousness will be expanded by an encounter with a sexually transgressive Other? Or do images of queer desire function instead to corroborate and confirm an identity that is always at risk of dissolution? Bright's book suggests that the representation of queerness in art can only proceed through a questioning of the rhetoric of art itself. Appropriately enough the book ends (almost) with two essays analyzing the visual politics of AIDS activism with a particular emphasis on the role of women. Both Erica Rand and Mary Patten write from a retrospective point of view. Their essays look back at the AIDS battles of the 1980s and early 1990s and look forward to the future of queer cultural activism, now forced to contend with the depoliticized mainstreaming of 'lesbian chic" (Linda Dittmar's apt term) and the still powerful energies of Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the conservative hordes.

Grant H. Kester is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at Arizona State University.

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