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Queer Enough
Nov 1, 2023
As Janine Utell writes of her experience in the opening post of this forum, reader reports can helpfully push our work forward towards publication. But she also points out that they can (perhaps unintentionally) dismantle our attempts to draw attention to what is excluded from conventional scholarly inquiry. I, too, recently was struck by a particularly provocative comment on an...
Looking With Images: Chinese Diasporic Worldmaking Beyond the Frame
Oct 26, 2023
For someone who thinks a lot about photography, I have decidedly mixed feelings about being seen. In Canada, where I grew up and once again live, the state’s term for non-Indigenous racialized people like me is “visible minority.” The hypervisibility of racialization often confers a kind of invisibility, however. As a cis scholar of mixed Chinese descent, I am persistently misrecognized by other members of the institutions through which I move, mistaken for a student, staff member, a...
“Ruthless Personalizers”: Queer Theory and the Uses of The Personal
Oct 5, 2023
Personal writing is having a moment. The recent attention to autotheory has enlivened longstanding debates about the politics of the personal as a critical scholarly mode, opening out new lines of inquiry into genre, method, and argument specifically around minoritarian aesthetics and the potential of scholarly work to elaborate forms of social justice. [1] Across what Robyn Wiegman has called “identity knowledges,” the...
“Improbable Life”: Bain, the Baroness, and Public Photography
Sep 21, 2023
I first encountered Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) at a conference on modernism and comedy. While her performance style is not exactly comical, the Baroness is most notable for her eccentric writing and elaborate costumes, despite the fact that her title brought her no monetary stability. Born in Germany, she immigrated to the US with a husband who soon abandoned her, she married the Baron (her third husband) who soon died, and she made her way to the Greenwich Village art...