In exploring the persistent relevance of aesthetics to modes of queerness, this panel asks, how do we translate visual codes from the past to read gendered and sexual identification in the present? What methodologies, critical questions, and modes of engagement do scholars use to describe what they sense, but cannot always see? Drawing on a range of queer archives from sexual communities positioned on the periphery of dominant culture—sex workers, gender outlaws, cultural provocateurs, and racialized others—this panel explores how sexual deviance and desire become captured in the visual record. Focusing on diverse articulations of racialized masculinities and femininities, these papers probe the multiple ways that non-normative genders become imagined as spectacles of consumption. In the process, the presenters look at the role style, gesture, and self-fashioning have played in shaping peripheral forms of self-representation and queer forms of racially gendered recognition.
Karen Jaime’s paper “Visualizing Butch Aesthetics: Stormé DeLarverie’s Timeless (Female) Masculinity” interrogates the cultural, racial, sexual, and temporal politics that inform both the staged and quotidian performances of masculinity by the late Stormé DeLarverie. This mixed-race, butch lesbian drag king in the ‘50s and ‘60s regularly performed in the Jewel Box Revue, and later served as bouncer at the iconic Henrietta Hudson bar in New York City’s West Village in the 1990s. Jaime analyzes Michelle Parkerson’s documentary Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box, a photograph of DeLarverie used to promote her cabaret singing, and a portrait taken by one of the former owners of Henrietta Hudson to unpack DeLarverie’s gender presentation, cabaret style singing, and subsequent employment in lesbian nightlife scenes and geographies to argue that DeLarverie’s fashion choices suggest the ways her butch aesthetic persisted across temporal registers.
In another consideration of butch aesthetics, Susana Vargas’s presentation “¡Qué lio, no se sabe si es mujer u hombre! (What a pickle, can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman!)” uses photographs of hombrecitas, “masculine type women” published in the sensationalist Mexican periodical Alarma! between 1963-1986 to posit that these photographs work as a site of resistance to and a subversion of many different forms of violence. Through an analysis of gesture, attitude, and style, Vargas reveals a process of subjectivation and subject identification informed as much by class/skin tonalities as by gender/sex. She explores this archive to ask what these different modes of identification say about national imaginaries and peripheral sexualities, specifically the different conceptualizations of male and female subjectivities, desires, identities, and practices within Mexico.
Turning to how forms of spectacular femininity are imagined and circulated across time, performance mediums, and geographic location, Laura Gutiérrez takes up the Nao Bustamente’s filmformance, Silver and Gold (2009). Commissioned for German film and video institute Arsenal a homage to the queer underground NYC filmmaker Jack Smith, Gutiérrez uses this understudied work that combines live action performance with film to consider the relationship between commercial and B-movie exoticism and queer avant-garde aesthetics. Gutiérrez argues that these queer visual rhetorics of exoticism are produced in and through different racialized bodies, María Montez, Mario Montez, and Bustamante herself in ways that defy mimetic performances to function as productive sites of being otherwise, being queer.
Finally, Juana María Rodríguez’s paper “Puta Aesthetics, Puta Life: Reading for Sexy” reflects on the unique role that sex workers have had in visual archives of sexuality and how images of their bodies circulate across aesthetic, ethnographic, juridical and erotic fields. Working between Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” and Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” her paper focuses on the interpretive practices we deploy to document the lives of those we will never know. She argues that archives function as highly mediated encounters with alterity, acting as complicated triggers for the attachments, identifications, and traumas of our own corporeal embodiments and sexual histories.
Bringing together scholars across different ranks, institutions, and geographic locations, this panel will be of interest to scholars interested in queer theory, affect studies, archives, photography, performance studies, and life narratives.