Risk, subversion and/or death in queer portraiture

http://www.thescavenger.net/arts/risk-subversion-and-or-death-in-queer-portraiture-78346.html

There is a danger in glorifying gender ambiguity in art without consideration for the real-life threats that gender-ambiguous people live with, writes Max Attitude.

What I'm interested in is the hostility with which gender ambiguous bodies are stared at, the actuality of violence against those bodies, and the ways visual – and performative – arts subvert, reinforce or simply avoid these real life threats that trans and gender ambiguous people live with.

To transgender studies, the photographic portrait provides a crucial argument for visibility and the centrality of corporeality [the body] to that discipline and ontology. As trans theorist Susan Stryker proclaims: '[Transgender studies] helps correct an all-too-common critical failure to recognize "the body" not as one (already constituted) object of knowledge among others, but rather as the contingent ground of all our knowledge, and of all our knowing.' That is, that our bodies tell (our) stories.