Visual Histories of Sex

Increased access to visual archives and the proliferation of digitized images related to sexuality have led a growing number of scholars in recent years to place images and visual practices at the center of critical historical inquiries of sexual desire, subjectivity, and embodiment. At the same time, new critical histories of sexual science serve both to expand the temporal and geographical frames for investigating the historical relationships of sex and visual production, and to generate new lines of inquiry and reshape visual studies more broadly. The contributors to this issue invite us to ask: What new questions and challenges for the study of sex and sexual science are posed by critical studies of the visual? How are new visual methodologies that focus on archives changing the contours of historical knowledge about sex and sexuality? What—and where—are new methodologies still needed? “Visual Archives of Sex” aims to illuminate current research that centers visual media in the history of sexuality and that interrogates contemporary historiographies.

“The Cost of That Revealing”

Interview with Derek Conrad Murray, professor of history of art and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Murray discusses his new book, Mapplethorpe and the Flower: Radical Sexuality and the Limits of Control (2020), selfies, and the present and future potentials and limitations of visual studies.

Las propuestas utópicas de Juan Navarro Baldeweg para el proyecto del Charles River (1971-1972). Ecosistemas urbanos para la transformación del medio ambiente

En 1971, Juan Navarro Baldeweg comienza una estancia en el Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) del Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), donde desarrollará una serie de intervenciones orientadas a la recuperación del entorno natural del Charles River. Las propuestas incluyeron unos dispositivos de apoyo informativo que registraban el nivel de contaminación atmosférica; un sistema artificial ecológico pensado para la reforestación de los márgenes del río y un ecosistema artificial que reproducía fragmentos de paisajes de diversas localizaciones. El artículo analiza estas propuestas utópicas nunca construidas, a partir de sus dibujos y fotomontajes, ya que constituyen la base de sus intereses artísticos, que desde entonces se reorientarían hacia instalaciones en el medio a partir de sistemas que tendieran hacia la desmaterialización del objeto; subordinando la materia física frente a la disposición de energías e indagando, por tanto, sobre los procesos naturales en sus aspectos fenomenológicos.

Thinking with Diplomacy: Within and Beyond Practice Theory

Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it goes beyond the conventional interactions that assume a fixed and singular identity for diplomacy. The Discussion aims, on the one hand, to pluralize the notion of diplomatic practice, and, on the other, to reflexively retrieve “theory” from the everyday and alternative practices of diplomacy that are often missed by the radar of practice theory. It thus seeks to reassess practice theory using insights from the very terrain of action it employs to develop its distinctive viewpoint. The Discussion contributes, moreover, to the rapidly changing field of Diplomatic Studies that has recently opened up to cross- and trans-disciplinary conversations with political geography, social anthropology, digital studies, visual studies, and new materialism.

Abstraction, Witnessing, and Repair; or, How Multimodal Research Can Destabilize the Coloniality of the Gaze

The recent renewal of attention to abstraction within Black literary and visual studies, it seems to us, has to do with an interest in the various ways abstraction rejects ascribed categories, eschews narrow assumptions about “relevance,” and embraces experimentation during a moment when it is arguably most needed. Abstraction moves us simultaneously outside of representative realism, and it embraces research practices that often require the kind of intimacies that have long been the bread and butter of anthropology. As multimodal ethnographers, we have long made our ethical commitments to interlocutors through embodied participation and collective knowledge production. In this essay, we attend to questions of abstraction, witnessing, and refusal within our own filmic and photographic practices addressing state violence in the Caribbean. We are interested in the spatio-temporality of both witnessing and refusal and in the relationships between form and audience. We are interested in how forms of abstraction capture the ephemeral, performative, affective, non-linear, and unpredictable ways something that feels like sovereignty circulates and is transmitted from one to another, without contributing to a process of overexposure or a desire for transparency.

Instruments of Vision

In the age of ubiquitous visual technologies and systems, our perceptive apparatuses are constantly challenged, adapted, and shaped by instruments and machines, rendering the observing body as an active site of knowledge. Your Eye's Motion by Luna is an interactive installation that uses real-time eye-tracking to control a robotic creature named Luna (Figure 1). Materializing eye movements through a wondrous spectacle of light, motion, and color, the observer becomes conscious of her gaze enacted and extended by a robotic counterpart. Building on a diverse set of theories and understandings of vision from the fields of cybernetics, visual studies, embodied mind, and more, the project explores how our perceptual apparatuses and bodies are reconfigured in relation to machines and the environment to afford new ways of seeing. Once we see how observing bodies accommodate feedback from actions to cognition, we can uncover the embodied and affective potential of eye movement as an interface for robotics. The curiosity of Luna invests in this potential, articulating a unity between our embodied percepts and machinic environments to create a "vision machine."

The Limits of Justice-Informed Research and Teaching in the Presence of Antiblackness and Black Suffering: Surplus of Transformation or (Un)Just Traumatic Returns?

In this conceptual article, I examine the turn of justice-oriented research and teaching from transformative to traumatic and its relationship to antiblackness. I consider the affordances and limits of research and teaching that makes antiblackness visible while simultaneously citing potentially traumatizing portraits of Black suffering. Drawing from critical multicultural education and social justice scholarship, alongside Black intellectual thought in literary studies, visual studies, Eastern philosophy, and participatory and ethnographic research, I ask whether and how researchers should engage justice-informed research and teaching. I offer insights to consider when seeking either to capture antiblack injustice or to share it as curriculum.

Visual Studies Workshop Press : a website description of process-based and experimental books

This applied thesis project deals with a selection of fifty books published by the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) Press in the 1970s and 1980s. The selection of books can be found in the Independent Press Archive that is currently held in the Research Center at the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) in Rochester N.Y. The objective for this applied project is to facilitate access and describe the selection of books through the construction of a website. The thesis is divided into two parts, a website description of the books and an analytical paper. The website will allow for visual access to some important experiments with the book format, analog experiments that were revolutionary in their time. The analytical paper includes a discussion of the decisions made while selecting and digitizing the books for the website. This thesis project will add to the current knowledge about VSW Press by providing a snapshot view of how the book format was utilized by artists and students working at VSW at a particular moment in history, a historical period in which photography media and publication were undergoing a time of remarkable growth.