"We must mobilise everything [we] can find in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in profoundly and deeply anti-humane."
         — Stuart Hall

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Journal of Visual Culture is an international refereed journal that welcomes compelling, critically engaged contributions that explore and expand trans-disciplinary global visual cultures.

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August 2020: The ‘Trans’ Issue, and new initiatives in urgent times...

David Antonio Cruz, suddenly,youandiwillwaitinyourdreams. . .tonight, portrait of Camila (2019), oil and enamel on wood. Image courtesy of Monique Meloche Gallery and the artist.

Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg, guest editors of our August 2020 themed issue on Transgender Art and Visual Culture describe their assemblage as ‘a prism, with no clear temporal progression or geopolitical center’.
This strikes us very suitable to describe our Editorial Group’s effort to render these very qualities in Journal of Visual Culture, albeit driven by a very palpable political and ethical agenda, as we head towards our 20th anniversary in 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic, but also the widespread social unrest that has been fueled by the planetary emergency, along with the protests globally following murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are elaborate and somehow even eloquent calls for a radical re-thinking we all must perform regarding our systems and institutions, and, more existentially, our ways of thinking, of being-with, and engaging one another with care and compassion.

The journal as a distributive platform of amplification will continue to give voice to those oppressed by white supremacy, to activism, and will continue to seek out (and respond to, thereby re-shaping the journal’s project) both matters-of-fact and matters-of-concern. As a quote from Stuart Hall on our masthead declares:

‘We must mobilise everything [we] can find in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in profoundly and deeply anti-humane.’
WE CAN ALWAYS DO MORE.


*Fittingly, our partner organization, the International Association of Visual Culture has paused their regular activity and devoted their entire landing page to a statement in support of social justice causes around the world, alongside a list of educational, philanthropic and bibliographical resources in that same direction. We invite you to read and share IAVC’s statement and resources here.

Collaboration with the Harun Farocki Institut
Leading to our 20th anniversary, we likewise continue to roll out a series of new initiatives that we hope will help shape the future of Journal of Visual Culture and will connect and engage our community of readers in ways that are sensitive to our current moment. We are delighted with the 38+ quality contributions that continue to shape our collaborative initiative with the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin, an initiative originally provoked by COVID-19, and which has since morphed necessarily into a conversation about the ugly convergences of the pandemic and white supremacy. Recent contributions are by Alexandra Délano Alonso on the death of nature, Kimberly Juanita Brown on unmasking the heart of whiteness, Janine Francois on racial ecologies and radical love, and Elisa Adami on ‘the underlying’ and the biopolitics of the undercommons.
Click here to read all the current contributions to our JVC-HaFI project.

This project will be assembled as a publication co-edited by Manca Bajec (JVC/Biennial Foundation) and Tom Holert (Harun Farocki Institut), and it’ll appear soon as the first in our new JVC BOOKS Series.


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​Dispatches
In keeping with the spirit of Visual Culture Studies for making space for intersectional and post-disciplinary ideas, along with the desire of Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Group to challenge constantly our own understanding of our field of inquiry, diversify our communities of interest, and means of dissemination, we are introducing Dispatches. This is an online, open source initiative that will serve as a permanent stage for contributions around larger topics of global concern, with an initial focuses on two distinct but inevitably interweaving strands: ecology and social unrest. 

Barbara Santos, Cuenco de cerca. Courtesy of the artist.

By offering a different temporality to that of peer reviewed articles, Dispatches is a format that allows for a more continuous engagement with the different issues that concern Visual Culture Studies. While the full length article and the themed issues of JVC constitute robust, meaningful engagements with subjects, Dispatches are means to respond promptly to recent events and current pressing issues; and notably, they offer visibility to the different forms, contexts, intensities and complexities of the intellectual debates around visual culture in all their geographical and cultural complexity.

Dispatches is quick publishing on pressing matters in urgent times.
Please click here to read our first three contributions from Sofia Guadalupe Sanchez, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Almira Ousmanova and Leandro Martinez Depietri, with more content forthcoming.


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JVC AUGUST 2020: ‘New Work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies’
Guest edited by Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg 

David Antonio Cruz, inmysleeplesssolitudetonight, portrait of the florida girls (2019), oil and enamel on wood, 48 x 72 inches. Image courtesy of Monique Meloche Gallery and the artist

When in 2005 Giuseppe Campuzano started his Museo Travesti del Peru (The Transvestite Museum of Peru), he introduced a decades-long struggle for rights, acknowledgment and visibility into the space devoted par excellence to the visual and material memory of human kind. Such gestures create the conditions for the inclusion of artistic and academic communities into the larger discussion of transgender cultures. Campuzano, who always strove for a contamination and a transvestism of culture at large, was one among many setting the stage for a revolution: the introduction of transgender culture in any history of human life is not a gesture for discovery, but rather the mending of a broken narrative built around fixed and narrow forms of thought and existence. It proposes an entirely different order of visuality.

Guest editors Cyle Metzger (Stanford University) and Kirstin Ringelberg (Elon University) present this multi faceted exploration of recent artistic and scholarly interventions around transgender art, which moves between considering bodies of artistic work, offering analytical tools to engage with trans art and culture, and examining local and personal histories. It is an ambitious thirteen-piece themed issue that substantially enriches the outlook of trans art in the context of visual culture.

In this issue:


Enjoy!

WE CAN ALWAYS DO MORE.

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Prismatic views: a look at the growing field of transgender art and visual culture studies
Guest editors Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg provide context, language and ‘instruments’ to engage with the diverse approaches to Transgender Art and Visual Culture offered by the contributors to this themed issue.

The wavering line of foreground and background: a proposal for the schematic analysis of trans visual culture
Eliza Steinbock borrows Susan Stryker’s language of trans emerging to the foreground against a set background of normative conditions to develop a language and a set of categories to engage trans visual culture and escape the visual essentialism that characterizes more traditional analysis.

Marie Høeg’s worldmaking photography: a photo essay
K.J. Rawson and Nicole Tantum present a photo-led essay on the work of Marie Høeg, seeking to uncover important considerations of visibility, privacy, and the ethics of circulation that they elicit. 

Familiar grammars of loss and belonging: curating trans kinship in post-dictatorship Argentina
Cole Rizki examines the archival exhibition Esta se fue, a esta la mataron, esta murió (2017), which installs trans subjects in the context of the Argentine dictatorship and the social and activist movement of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo that emerged from that period.

The diversity of the middle: mythology in intersectional trans representation
Exploring the intersectionality that is inherent to trans culture analysis, Sascha Crasnow looks into the use of mythological hybrid figures in works by two non-binary queer contemporary artists of color, to challenge the notion of the hybrid as a composite of oftentimes irreconcilable parts. 

Decolonizing objecthood through 2SQ Indigenous art: Dayna Danger and Jeneen Frei Njootli’s performance, ‘Chases and Tacks’
Sebastian De Line looks into Dayna Danger and Jeneen Frei Njootli’s performance, ‘Chases and Tacks’, inviting an analysis based on Indigenous ways of knowing, as means to escape the essentialist binaries (of gender) all too common in Western epistemologies.

Pretty in pink: David Antonio Cruz’s portrait of the florida girls
Robb Hernández looks into the ways in which the work of artist David Antonio Cruz intervenes and critiques the inaccurate depictions of transgender image in media.

‘I’m a person who loves beautiful things’: Potassa de Lafayette as model and muse
Kara Carmack considers Potassa de Lafayette’s strategies of self-presentation as a case of color trans bodies’ empowering and negotiating difference.

Trans men’s stealth aesthetics: navigating penile prosthetics and ‘gender fraud’
Chris Straayer examines trans commercial production of penile prosthetics, the efficacy of such products in personal and sex-segregated spaces, and their negative valence in the public sphere.

On Jesse Darling
Heather Holmes highlights a recent exhibition of the work of Jesse Darling, in which the depiction of the body as unruly, unpredictable and prone to change, makes for an outstanding case for presenting an alternative to the more common analysis of the non-conforming body as erasing its marks of specificity.  

Surviving in the shadow of the un/seen: on the paradoxical in/visibility of El Kazovsky
Susan Stryker explores the paradox of Russian-Hungarian, trans-identified artist El Kazovsky’s visibility as a nationally celebrated artist in a moment of extreme state-sanctioned queer-phobia in Hungary, and the illegibility of his transness. 

‘I do not want to pass’: embodiment, metaphor, and world-making in Patrick Staff’s Weed Killer
KJ Cerankowski collates archival object encounters into a transgender ‘ghost story’ that marks the impossibility of a straightforward history of the subject, relying instead on embodied encounters with archive objects, or the remnants (ghostly and tangible) of archival subjects.

Reviews include books by Dominic Johnson, Joan Kee, Tom Rice, and Jenny Odell.