Visualizing Queer/Trans Life, Love, and Politics through Photography

AHA Session 120
LGBTQ+ History Association (formerly CLGBTH) 6
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Murray Hill West (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
Chair:
Laurie Marhoefer, University of Washington, Seattle
Comment:
Ka-Man Tse, New School

Session Abstract

Walking a fine line between smut and art, private and public, photography plays a central role in how people negotiate rebellion, play, defiance, empowerment and community. Globally, in the 1960s and 1970s, the culture of image making, whether in camera clubs, among artists, activists or art critics began to change. While once eschewing explicit imagery, galleries from Amsterdam to New York and Tokyo began exhibiting photos from new and emerging artists, while art historians and cultural critics wrote seminal texts about the medium. Camera club aficionados discussed the technology de jour while artists and activists created ethnographies of their city’s gay, lesbian, and trans scenes. Art historians debated the merits of image making in newly minted journals like October, forged from the embers of the Lynda Benglis Artforum scandal, while soon to be famous art-school students like Robert Mapplethorpe moved away from mixed media and sculpture towards a full-time fascination with photos. The availability of film stock at increasingly affordable prices meant more people picked up the camera to document their lives and New Left students and activists followed suit, seeing in the medium an opportunity to politicize the struggle.

While legal reform bills snaked their way through national parliaments in some parts of the globe, radically redefining the role of the state in regulating the sexual behavior of its citizens, private behaviour became public fodder for minority groups who were among the first to suffer at the hands of government pushback. Liberationist movements created new iconographies of outrage while students and workers took to the streets but rarely shoulder to shoulder with their gay, lesbian, and trans sisters and brothers. The winds of change managed to waft their way across the Iron Curtain, where placards, pamphlets, and pictures from the West were seized by the secret police or added to the arsenal of local activist groups already active in mobilizing for change. The revolution of taste and sensibility was not just in the streets, it was televised during the evening news, on screen at the movies, and in magazines and advertising, while sex education was designed to pass on to the youth the shape of possibility to come. Photography sat at this nexus, part education of desire, instrument of repression, technology of rebellion and art of the masses.

This panel approaches the theme of photography and its role in visualizing queer and trans worlds and worldmaking in a global setting with papers on gay liberationist photography in the Americas, trans kinship in Italy and Brazil and radical queer sex organizing and care in Toronto, Canada. It asks us to consider the work of images in realizing - in some cases presaging and extending - the emotional attachments and commitments that formed part of visibility politics of the era. While much of the historiography on LGBTQIA life and organizing centers around medicine, sexology, and social movements, this panel shifts attention to photography to interrogate the power and importance of picturing desire, politics, identity and kinship in the 1970s and after.

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