Cracks Only- Queer Placemaking by a Diverse Gaze in Image-Based Media

cracks only

Queer Placemaking by a Diverse Gaze in Image-Based Media

Thesis of Marie Romeijn

written within the diploma session 2021/22, 15.11.2022 at the Faculty of Design and Arts of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Supervisor: Davide Ferrando

Second supervisor: Rosalyn D’Mello

Abschlussarbeit von Marie Romeijn

verfasst innerhalb der Prüfungssession 2021/22, 15.11.2022 an der Fakultät für Design und Künste der Freien Universität Bozen

Betreuer*in: Davide Ferrando

Mitbetreuer*in: Rosalyn D’Mello

Tesi di laurea elaborata da Marie Romeijn per la sessione d’esame 2021/22, 15.11.2022 presso la Facoltà di Design e Arti della Libera Università di Bolzano

Relatore: Davide Ferrando

Correlatric:e Rosalyn D’Mello

Since its invention in 1839 there has always been photographic representation of identity, gender, and sexuality: from historical imagery showing the act of photographing as an act of identity formation, as in the exhibition Queerness in Photography1—showing a now public archive of photographs, depicting with little to no context, individuals ‘cross-dressing’ in their home environments—to a unique safe space in photographic history, to contemporary expressions of many marginalised identities. By inscribing constructed gender roles, as well as ‘studying’ native cultures in a colonised context, photography also became a medium of stigmatisation and discrimination2. As in Brassaï’s photographs of lesbian bars in the early 20th century Paris that capture hidden worlds of thieves, pimps, prostitutes, and queers. Hungarian-born French photographer credited with creating countless images of 1920s Parisian life, Brassaï’s photographs in the book The Secret Paris of the 1930’s3 are intended to look back on the sinful and seamy worlds that the artist documented but could not show at the time the photographs were taken. When the book was fnally published in the 1970s it was accompanied by a moralistic text designed to explain the ‘weird’ images to an imaginary ‘straight’ reader4 .

So, the issue of the constructed gaze, one is looking with or through at photographic imagery, as well as one is creating imagery with, has to be examined.

In a particular gaze, there are sub-branches: the person behind the camera, the character, subject within the representation of the flm or image, and the spectator. The phrase ‘male gaze’ refers to the frequent framing of objects of visual art so that the viewer is situated in a masculine position of ‘appreciation’.5 I adopt this concept and examine how a ‘straight gaze’ creates tropes about queerness and its presentation to the straight eye. Certain markers and traits are assigned to an individual in order to make them seem queer and construct fat characterisations or presentations of otherness against the cis-heteronormative. Although queer representation should be individually and collectively freeing of tropes, it is a constant challenge to portray the queer or to have queer portrayal without reinforcing further the cis-heteronormative agenda by catering to the straight gaze. But what is the real potential of queer representation, besides being utilised to uphold and reinforce the narrative of us versus them, as in othering?

The Mary Nardini gang, an anarchist collective, puts it in their words in the clandestinely printed and distributed text titled Toward the Queerest Insurrection. It is an anti-assimilationist queer declaration against all forms of domination from the cis-heteronormative world. Having circulated through many underground circles, it has become a necessary read for all queer revolutionaries.

1 C/O Berlin. 2022. Queerness in Photography, C/O Berlin

2 Cole, Teju. 2019. When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.), The New York Times Magazine, February 6

3 Brassaï. 2001. The Secret Paris of the 1930’s, Thames & Hudson, June 21, frst published 1976

4 Halberstam, Judith (Jack). 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, 98

5 Korsmeyer, Carolyn and Peg Brand Weiser. 2004. “Feminist Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta

“Some will read ‘queer’ as synonymous with ‘gay and lesbian’ or ‘LGBT’. This reading falls short. While those who would ft within the constructions of ‘L’, ‘G’, ‘B’ or ‘T’ could fall within the discursive limits of queer, queer is not a stable area to inhabit. Queer is not merely another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities. Rather, it is the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability—an identity that problematizes the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a territory of tension, defned against the dominant narrative of white hetero monogamous patriarchy, but also by an affnity with all who are marginalized, otherized and oppressed. Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in confict with the heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the Normal.” 6

What the Mary Nardini Gang envisions for queer being goes far beyond bland portrayal of the queer against a binary counterpart. The suggestion of queer as a qualitative position and a territory for action lies in embracing its negativity, the loss of normalcy, the unstable. All of which were once attributed to queerness by the straight, now they are used as tools for revolt.

To bring the notion of queer as a territory of action to life, cultivating a practice-based research was a crucial point to fnd the answer to how queer representation can work. Through an image-based practice I examined further what it means to position queer inside a narrative of doing. The search for photographic representations by cultivating an affnity with all who are marginalised, otherised and oppressed and by a continuous breaking down of power structures led to reframing the act of taking a photograph in the frst place.

Starting with studio photography, I wanted to reframe the standard practice, which would be to confront subject with photographer and photographer with subject through the lens. Rather, I thought of me as a supplier and the camera as the tool. It was left to the subject to decide where to position themselves in the frame and when to trigger the shutter. Based on the camera and lens settings the image would appear focused, slightly blurry or blurred out, all depending on the subject’s decisions.

Trying to fnd a photographical representation while eluding the straight gaze, as well as its othering nature, meant to rephrase what it is to be the author of, in this case an image. By proposing a tool for the subject’s own authorship, the proposal itself is what demands responsibility from another party, concerning the offer, space and the technical setup. Through this frst exploration and realisation, I tried

6 Mary Nardini Gang. 2014. Toward the Queerest Insurrection, originally printed clandestinely as a zine, redistributed by Radical Reprints

to tackle the heterosexist assumption that heterosexuality is a default neutral state, that people are automatically heterosexual unless they prove otherwise, distinguished in the procedure of “Coming out of the closet”. An approach to rephrase it to a Letting in, was by having it translated visually through an image-based medium.

Doing studio photography provided a clean, predictable and enclosed environment, keeping it private up until the moment the image would be displayed publicly. To take the concept of supplier and subject as author into the outside space would of course change some technical parameters, but foremost all aspects concerning queer action in spaces open to the public.

An approach to public space in a queer fashion leads to an investigation of what queer placemaking can look like. Lucas LaRochelle, designer and researcher, concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and co-creative media founded Queering the map, which is a community-generated counter-mapping platform that digitally archives queer experience in relation to physical space. The interactive map provides an interface with which to collaboratively archive the cartography of queer life in order to preserve queer histories and realities. The ongoing communal generation of queer narratives in relation to space encourages the notion of queer as an act, of doing queer, as it escapes the confnes of current realities that do not properly consider the safety and welfare of marginalised life across intersecting identities. LaRochelle writes:

“We cannot be queer in a fxed sense, but we are doing queer through acts of resistance. To this we shall refer to as queering or queering of. In order for a queer safe space to happen, we have to not think of queer spaces in a fxed sense, but rather of spaces in which we are doing queer, spaces that we are queering. (We) poistion queer space as something in the continous breaking down of cis-heteronormative white supremacist, colonial, classist and ableist structures.” 7

How can queer placemaking in its transient nature be combined with the attempt to capture, to document moments of queering space without reinforcing further the cis-heteronormative agenda by catering to the straight gaze? The photographic documentation is serving as an archive of evidence of the queer and a queering of a certain time and place, while the style of documentation tries to elude the straight gaze through its way of readjusting the hierarchical structure of authorship and ownership in the feld of image based production. The authorship is obtained by the subject having to take decisions of focal length, frame, their posture, and timing.

7 LaRochelle, Lucas. 2022. Queering the map in Queer Sites in Global Context- Technologies, Spaces and Otherness, edited by Regner Ramos and Sharif Mowlabocus, Routledge, 137

Letting In, 4x5inch analogue black and white print

Changing the parameters of photographic action led to the consideration of how to do photographic representation of identity, gender, and sexuality, without adding to the cis-heteronormative narration of queerness by queer tropes.8 The validity of queerness does not depend on physical characteristics, behaviour or clothing. But still photography does not only depict people, but also signifcantly shapes their sociopolitical position by visually categorising individuals based on those markers and characteristics. By marking constructed gender roles, photography can become a medium of stigmatisation and discrimination. As queer visibility is now growing, as well as the spectrum of theories and ideas in diverse LGBTQIA+ communities, so too has the photographic vocabulary for visually representing queerness multiplied.

A native of Sāmoa, Yuki Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent whose work seeks to challenge dominant and singular historical narratives through visual arts, dance, and curatorial practice, engaging with postcolonial history and representation in the Pacifc and how they intersect with race, gender, spirituality and sexual politics. Kihara lives and works in Sāmoa, where she has been based over the last 11 years. Kihara is the frst Pacifc Indigenous artist from Samoa’s Fa’afafne community to represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale. Fa’afafne identify as separate genders from western binary categories.9 In Paradise Camp, curated by Natalie King, a fve-part episodic “talk show” series whereby a group of Fa‘afafne comment wittily on select Gauguin paintings and Kihara’s personal research archive. Addressing intersectionality between decolonisation, identity politics, and climate crisis from a perspective, exhibited are twelve photographs, located in Sāmoa from villages, to churches, plantation and heritage sites shot with a local cast and crew. The photographs ‘upcycle’ and repurpose paintings by Gauguin and are exhibited against a vast wallpaper of an ocean scape, that was destroyed by a Tsunami in 2009. Kihara subverts the fetishising and colonising gaze in Gauguin’s work and applies a diverse photographic vocabulary.10

It is essential to seek multiple ways for queer existence, for queer life and placemaking and its representation. José Esteban Muñoz, Cuban American academic in the felds of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies and critical theory, urges to not conform to normative representation, since this would mean to be trapped within the limiting ways of the normative time and present. In Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, Muñoz emphasises the importance of disrupting social scripts and opening possibilities for other visions of the world that map different, utopian social relations.

I want to see what other ways there are to represent queerness and queer lives from all parts of the world. In doing so I have to accept

8 Gilchrist, Tracy E. and Reynolds, Daniel. 2017, 17 LGBTQ Tropes Hollywood Needs to Retire, Advocate: Pride Publishing inc, August 29

9 McMullin, Dan Taulapapa and Kihara, Yuki. 2018. Sāmoan Queer Lives, Little Island Press

La Biennale die Venezia. 2022. Biennale Arte 2022: New Zealand, labiennale.org, date accessed October 28

Queering Archive 35mm analogue colour prints

or force some sort of loss. Loss of heteronormative, authoritarian, elitist and entitled ways of portrayal. To be lost in a queer way does not mean hiding in the closet or simply disappearing. It enables us further to see what else there is to be found. It opens up ways and paths to places that are to be discovered with curiosity, wit and without taking ourselves too seriously. On this journey we have to embrace the silly, the goofy, the paths that seem awry, may lead to nowhere, or make little to no sense at all at frst glance. What stays important is to dare to go there. Muñoz argues: “To accept the ways in which one is lost is to be also found and not found in a particularly queer fashion.”11

In forcing some sort of loss related to my practice-based research, I imagined it to be crucial to explore what other ways there are to photographically portray queerness without staying in the frame of classical portrait photography. Using a macro lens instead of a standard portrait lens, I embarked on a quest to get closer, literally and metaphorically. Moving carefully, focusing on ambiguous bodily areas without changing the focal point as the camera would back up, resulted in a blurred merging of subject with landscape, as if the subject could almost evade some attributions related to their presentation of gender and sexuality. Almost a fight from defnitive categories, still markers of identity, like clothing, skin and hair remained visible, allowing for assumptions that lead to a categorisation based on markers and characteristics that uphold the othering regime of the cis-heteronormative.

Queerness in the realms of an othering world is either made a trope or made invisible. Both those attributions belong to queer identity formation inside of cis-heteronormativity. Tropes enable the formation of a caricature of the queer. A constructed polarity between the normal versus the representation of one specifc queer as fgurehead for all queer individuals stigmatises and restricts personal freedom and expression in the lives of all queer individuals. Even so much so that it was and it is still dangerous, since stigmatisation is just the frst step of an othering agenda. It leads to fetishisation, discrimination, hate and severe harm against queer lives.12

Joiri Minaya is a Dominican-U.S. multi-disciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilising historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. Minaya has exhibited internationally across the Caribbean and the U.S.. The work, titled Containers features multiple women spread around a garden or park wearing “tropical pattern” bodysuits with concealed speakers playing female voices. The voices meditate on landscape and gender, immigration, preservation, camoufage, assimilation, otherness, refusal, agency and (in)visibility. The voiceover is mixed with text on: 17th and 18th century European expeditions in South

11 Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press, 73

12 Marquis, Ash. 2021. Fetishization of the Queer Community, Youth OUTright, October 25

America; books on “how to communicate with your Spanish-speaking gardener”; guides on “how to loose your native accent”, botanical catalogues, information from profles from vacation dating online catalogs of D.R.-women. With the bodies concealed with fabric and the wearer made nearly anonymous, Minaya addresses tropes about the objectifcation, fetishisation and othering of Black Latinx marginalised lives and bodies.13

What has been and still is providing safety in queer lives is to remain in anonymity. Anonymity, which in its refusal to perform fxed self defnition resists dominant power structures that root for the eradication of marginalised narratives, bodies and lives.

To explore the potential of anonymity as a concept and as inherent part of queer identity was a critical part of LaRochelles Queering the map. In an article on the project published by Ruthless Magazine, writer and poet Angad Singh elaborates on the generative potentials of anonymity. Anonymity serves and always has served the purpose to stay safe and create safe spaces in queer being and doing. Not only is anonymity described as a trait inherent to queer being inside the structure and shackles of the normative, but it generates more accurate queer representation all while actually managing to escape the straight gaze.

“…It might sound like a strange aspiration, to be anonymous. Maybe it’s also strange that a project that assigns its participants blanket anonymity provides exactly the conditions necessary to give a diverse and persecuted demographic visibility. But anonymity is distinct from invisibility. It presupposes a crowd in which to lose oneself, with which to be amalgamated. Perhaps it touches on a sense of belonging that so many of us have lacked in our formative years in an othering world. In the case of ‘queering the map’ anonymity is the basis of our ability to become known.” 14

Queer anonymity, the acceptance of failure and loss of normative identity politics foster essential ways of queer placemaking rooted in a diverse collective visibility. Queer visibility in all aspects of life is important, but not if it further continues to give straight people the chance to voice their feelings and judgement about queerness, or to control queer portrayal. What Singh illustrates is how queer anonymity can guarantee a more accurate demographic visibility of queer lives and spaces. By that a different viewpoint on queer representation and visibility is formed: the queer gaze.

What characteristics can form the queer gaze? The queer gaze is operating from welcoming failure as one of the many traits ascribed to the unstable category that is queer. It subverts the gaze that has

13 Minaya, Joiri. 2022. “Containers” (documentation of performance at Wave Hill, 2017), Art At A Time Like This, date accessed October 29, 2022

14 Singh, Angad. 2018. “Queering the Map: A Skype Call with Lucas LaRochelle.” Ruthless Magazine, July 13

been historically imposed and turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. Queer failure shows itself in the unwillingness to uphold what is deemed good and normal by cis-heteronormative expectation. It loses it and thus imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being. In the book Queer Art of Failure Jack Halberstam, American academic and professor at Columbia University, argues that failure can be a productive way of critiquing capitalism and cis-heteronormativity, alongside exploring alternatives to individualism and conformity.

“To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the fnite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy.” 15

The queer subject has been bound to negativity, to nonsense, to failure, and instead of fghting this characterisation by wanting to drag queerness into recognition, the embrace of the negativity that it anyway structurally represents, becomes a pivotal part in queering the sociocultural formation of the gaze in queer image based production and the perception thereof. As Halberstam declares, not only an acceptance of the fnite, of failure is part of queer life, but so is the refuge to an absurd, humorous, campy take on it.

Susan Sontag, the late American writer, philosopher and activist published Notes on Camp and argues that Camp is as much an aesthetic as it is a sensibility that converts the serious into the frivolous. In its appreciation of failed seriousness, of the theatricalisation of the experience, camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the identifcation with extreme feelings. Camp is a subtle, yet extravagant way of revolt against the normative by its delicate manoeuvres between parody and self-parody. The democratic spirit of camp neutralises moral protest and promotes playfulness. Sontag writes:

“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.” 16

To form a different viewpoint meant to endeavour into the discontinuous presentations of queer life and marginalised bodies by rewriting the historically imposed gaze. The reduction of markers in the visual content allowed to generate the framework necessary for queer representation through a queer gaze. Now the gaze must resist the normative and has to imagine its own characteristics for visual production. Sontag describes another sensibility of Camp aesthetics as following:

15 Halberstam, Judith (Jack). 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, 186,187

Sontag, Susan. 1966. “Notes on Camp” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

17 Sontag,

Susan. 1966. “Notes on Camp” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

“Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human–in short, another valid sensibility–is being revealed” 17

This sensibility can be found in the investigation of image production by the queer gaze. How much is revealed or visible, rephrased to what exactly is revealed and visible was a pivotal point in my practise-based research. I had to make the decision of what to show and what not to show. What i wanted to show was portraits of queer bodies and what i chose to portray was a specifc body part. Evoking the failed seriousness in Camp and adding to its frivolous nature, I chose to show the butt.

The butt is a very symbolic part of human bodies. And its classifcation as a portrait adds to the campy notion of the seriousness that fails, yet allows for playfulness and frivolity. Cracks Only represents queer individuals. Zoomed in up to the crack and photographed with a fashlight, it is about representation of marginalised individuals as much as it is about fghting for a place in an othering world in a queer fashion. The disregard to show portraits of a face or torso and to instead provocatively show butts intertwines with the formation of a diverse gaze by queer characteristics, like queer anonymity, queer failure and Camp. Another crucial characteristic for the queer gaze is intersectionality, which considers all forms of marginalisation that reinforce different discriminatory categories at the same time. Those categories must therefore be analysed and addressed simultaneously.18 The intersectional approach decentralises the Western construct of queerness, pushing historical and contemporary presentations to more diverse, intersectional narratives. Just now, the queer gaze combined with the notion of queer placemaking can provide an act of revolt for the queer community inside institutions that are still labouring towards the entrenched forms of cissexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism and colonialist oppression.19

British-Australian writer and scholar Sara Ahmed’s research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds as well as in institutional cultures.

18 Center for Intersectional Justice. 2022. What is intersectionality, intersesctionaljustice.org, date accessed October 27, 2022 19 LaRochelle, Lucas. 2022. Queering the map in Queer Sites in Global Context- Technologies, Spaces and Otherness, edited by Regner Ramos and Sharif Mowlabocus, Routledge, 135

20 Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press, 545

The creation of visible queer space, has historically been positioned as antithetical to, or a transgression of, heteronormative space. Queer placemaking is an essential tool to challenge the order inside of institutional structures. Performative inclusivity of the LGBTQIA+ Community in institutions and their exploitation of queerness for publicity only further pushes the cis-heteronormative ways of appropriating marginalised lives for their own good.21 By queering already existent institutional spaces, it is made visible what power structures they operate from. Cracks Only investigates invisibility, exclusion and repulsion that has historically constructed the reality of marginalised lives in most institutional spaces.

The queering aspect in Cracks Only calls for the tacky, the raunchy, yet sensible approach of Camp, its mixture of “high” and “low”, the “good” and “bad” in culture production. A “low” part in German culture production has been a peculiar practise of German vacationers. They are notoriously known and mocked by many neighbouring western nationalities for sneakily reserving sun beds with beach towels very early in the morning.22 Be it at swimming pools, in hotels, or resorts, in popular vacation destinations among Germans the temporary inhabitance by towel is a symbol for their presence and ownership of the space on the sun beds. This silly technique that proclaims mostly public space to be one’s own, is used in Cracks Only.

The towels then serve as a tool, that can be transported and allocated in different places and institutional spaces that historically have held and still hold positions of power based on privileges rooted in cisgender, heterosexuality, class, ability and/ or eurocentricity. The queering aspect of the work is projected onto the characteristics of given spaces, such as the exclusion of marginalised individuals and communities.

In this case, the portraits of bare butts printed onto towels are placed onto chairs reserved for the university professors at the thesis presentation. Pointing to the German vacationers’ ritual of claiming temporary ownership of space, the towels serve as a tool to question dominant narratives of rank, status and importance. Subsequently the space is queered. Synonyms of the chair as in boss, chief, manager, director, leader or president demonstrate further the underlying hierarchical order of the chair itself in its symbolism for power and control. With portraits of their butts, queer individuals are projected inside of the institutional space that mostly does not actively promote visibility by considering the marginalised, their diverse narrative and an equal distribution of power. Furthermore the queered portraits on the towels carry the queer gaze into reality, as they deny the straight gaze to make attributions to the individual’s unique queerness or most other markers of their identity.

Marcel. 2022. Warum reservieren Urlauber Liegen mit dem Handtuch?, Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 14

The queer use of this particular institutional space, points out its cis-heteronormative workings. In this case it makes visible who would have been seated, hence who is in power, and is now forced to give up their seat, their position. I also make use of the privileges I hold as a white person, as i position myself in allyship with those who are marginalised due to racial biases and its colonialist substructure. The vacation towels as placeholders for actual institutional representation of the marginalised BIPoC and LGBTQIA+ community make institutional hierarchies the butt of the joke in an undeniably Campy manner.

aLLYSHIP

The status or role of a person who advocates and actively works for the inclusion of a marginalised or politicised group in all areas of society, not as a member of that group but in solidarity with its struggle and point of view.

bINARY

A binary system contains two elements, constructed as polarities. Gender, sex, and sexuality are all frequently treated as oppositional binaries, as in woman/man, female/ male, straight/gay. These binary classifcations are at odds with the many different variations observed in bodies, gender expressions and identities, as well as feelings and categories of love and desire.

bIPoC

Stands for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour.

cAMP

Camp is a subtle, yet extravagant way of revolt against the normative by its delicate manoeuvres between parody and self- parody. The democratic spirit of camp neutralises moral protest and promotes playfulness. “In naïve, or pure, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails, that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.” wrote Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” Camp as an aesthetic can be defned by its famboyant, exaggerated nature, its disregard for the boundaries between “low” and “high” culture and “good” and “bad” taste.

cISNORMATIVITY

The belief that being cisgender is normal and being transgender is abnormal, and the structures and systems caused and sustained by this belief. In turn, these structures and systems promote the idea of cisnormativity. Cisnormativity is bound up with cissexism, in which cisnormativity becomes both actively and passively hostile to trans and gender nonconforming people.

fETISHIZATION

Fetishization is the reduction of a person to aspects of their body, identity, or relationship structure. Fetishization in terms of gender and desire frequently occurs in conjunction with objectifcation and power. Men and women of Color are frequently fetishized by white people, in society and in artistic practice, through different stereotypes and limitations. Trans and disabled people are also subject to fetishization, particularly in bodily terms.

hETERONORMATIVITY

The belief, and structures created and maintained by the belief, that heterosexuality is normal and natural and that bisexuality or homosexuality are abnormal and unnatural. Heterosexism can be seen in the assumption that heterosexuality is a default neutral statethat people are automatically heterosexual unless they prove otherwise. Heterosexism can also be forcefully and/or violently expressed through structural discrimination against same-sex couples and the punishment of those engaging in same-sex behaviors.

23 C/O Berlin. 2022. Queerness in Photography, partial adaptation of the exhibitions glossary

iNTERSECTIONALITY

Describes the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects.

lGBTQIA+

Stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer Intersex, Asexual and the + stands for the fact that there is more to identify with in the queer community.

n ORMATIVITY

The process by which some groups of people, forms of expression, and types of behaviour are classifed according to a perceived standard of what is “normal,” “natural,” desirable, and permissible in society. Inevitably, this process labels people, expressions, and behaviours that do not ft these norms as abnormal, unnatural, undesirable, and unacceptable.

oTHERING

Othering is the process by which a person or group of people is transformed into the “Other”: the outsider, the alien, the “Them” in “Us vs.Them.” “Othering” very often involved a process of dehumanisation, and of designating the “out-group” as less than the “in- group.” An understanding of othering is crucial in understanding the patterns, processes, and functions of discrimination and prejudice.

qUEER

Formerly a slur, now a term of reclamation that can refer to sexual and gender identities. Queerness can be a specifc and radical site of community and activism in solidarity with many kinds of difference, and specifcally opposed to heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Queer studies and queer theory are important emerging felds of study, that explore further the unstable category that is queer.

qUEERING

Instead of thinking about queerness in a fxed sense or as a fxed identity, queering refers to queerness as an act. In doing queer through acts of resistance against prevailing power structures, queering or queering of space is happening. Queer space is not a location in a fxed sense, but can be positioned as a continuous breaking down of cisnormative and heteronormative structures.

sTRAIGHT GAZE

Outlook, narratives and feelings that straight people have about queerness. Queer individuals are stripped of their personhood and reduced to tropes which serve as a stabilisation for cis-heteronormative identity politics in the juxtapositional portrayal of the non normative, the other.

tROPES

Tropes are simply seen as recurrent and recognisable devices, similar to archetypes. While clichés are considered overused and best avoided, tropes don’t carry the same stigma. Originated in the Greek word tropos, which meant “a turn, direction, fashion and manner, tropes in image based media fatten the character of the portrayed to a singular attribution.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press

Brassaï. 2001. The Secret Paris of the 1930’s, Thames & Hudson, June 21, frst published 1976

Center for Intersectional Justice. 2022. What is intersectionality, intersesctionaljustice.org, date accessed October 27, 2022

C/O Berlin. 2022. Queerness in Photography, C/O Berlin

Cole, Teju. 2019. When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.), The New York Times Magazine, February 6

Gilchrist, Tracy E. and Reynolds, Daniel. 2017, 17 LGBTQ Tropes Hollywood Needs to Retire, Advocate: Pride Publishing inc, August 29

Halberstam, Judith (Jack). 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press

Korsmeyer, Carolyn and Peg Brand Weiser. 2004. “Feminist Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta

La Biennale die Venezia. 2022. Biennale Arte 2022: New Zealand, labiennale.org

LaRochelle, Lucas. 2022. Queering the map in Queer Sites in Global Context- Technologies, Spaces and Otherness, edited by Regner Ramos and Sharif Mowlabocus, Routledge

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Marquis, Ash. 2021. Fetishization of the Queer Community, Youth OUTright, October 25

McMullin, Dan Taulapapa and Kihara, Yuki. 2018. Sāmoan Queer Lives, Little Island Press

Minaya, Joiri. 2022. “Containers” (documentation of performance at Wave Hill, 2017), Art At A Time Like This, date accessed October 29, 2022

Morris, Carmen. 2022. Performative Allyship: What Are The Signs And Why Leaders Get Exposed, Forbes Magazine, October 12

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press

Singh, Angad. 2018. Queering the Map: A Skype Call with Lucas LaRochelle, Ruthless Magazine, July 13

Sontag, Susan. 1966. “Notes on Camp” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux