Visual Culture, Transvestiture and Political Catastrophe(Or, So Is Art Queer, Then?)

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of the denial of the impossibility of representation that is the foundational support of ‘art history’ and ‘visual culture’ studies through the trope of ‘queering’, appropriated (albeit in some cases precipitously essentialized) in recent gay andlesbian studies, and emblematic there of a broader irresolvable ambivalence in cultural studies toward the entailment of people with their object-worlds, their stuff. It argues that this oscillation in visual studies, art history and criticism (and museology in particular) isneither accidental nor a failure of modern social systems but rather the very engine of modernity and its conceivable or purported ‘posts’, arguing further that this double bind itself has been rooted in a variety of post-Enlightenment secular revivals of monotheistic religiosity. It suggests that imagining a critical politics requires us to abandon addressing this core dilemma as a set of alternative polities (the aestheticization of politics versus the politicization of the aesthetic).