let's agree that the best way to deal with disgusting hate like this is by decontextualizing a few of the really choice images so that they kind of suggest a hilarious jaded genderqueer perspective. I mean, really - 'clothing not clashing is essentialist' is more than little hilarious.
Mercer begins with an analysis of Mapplethorpe’s Black Book, especially in relation to Man in a Polyester Suit. Utilizing feminist theories of visual representation in relation to sexual difference, Mercer argues that the photographs reinscribe a traditionally erotic racist, sexist, and colonial gaze in which white men look, and – transferred from the typically Oedipal sexual difference – black men are looked at. Inscribed within the look, Mercer suggests, is a white male subject-position insofar as the fantasy of mastery revealed in the aesthetic qualities of the photography – the posing, lighting, and framing, for example – implies a racial hierarchy. Finally, the pleasures elicited from the photographs are fetishistic in their reliance on and fixation with colonial fantasy. In Man, for example, Mercer argues that the framing of the photograph emphasizes the “sheer size of the big black penis” which, consistent with Fanon’s articulation of racial fetishization, invokes the primal white supremacist fear of – and fixation with – the black phallus as a threat to both white womanhood and civilization. Further, the contrast of the (cheap) suit and the penis reproduce a racial binary of white civilization and black nature.
In realizing however that much of this analysis is grounded in a heterosexual Oedipal scenario and may therefore be inadequate to theorize a homoerotic gaze, Mercer comes to change his mind about – or at least comes to a significantly ambivalent position regarding - his reading of racial fetishization in the photographs. In his rereading of Mapplethorpe, Mercer suggests instead that the photographs cannot be read simply as reinforcing or disrupting racial stereotypes but may “throw the question back at the spectator,” destabilizing a secure identity within a structure of unconscious racial and sexual fantasies. The “shock effect” of the photographs, Mercer continues, may not be “necessarily a bad thing” insofar as they encourage the examination of one’s own implication in the perverse fantasies aroused by the photographs. As a gay male desiring subject, for example, Mercer inhabits the position of fantasmatic mastery previously ascribed to the white male subject. His own anger then, may be attributable to a projection and disavowal of his own desire. Thus, Mapplethorpe’s photographs may be seen as powerful and disturbing insofar as they invoke an uncomfortable “structure of feeling” which forces acknowledgment of the ambivalent positions of identity inhabited by those “living with difference.”
Mercer’s second reading foregrounds Mapplethorpe’s identity as a gay artist at the margins of the mainstream art world whose “aesthetic strategy” may work to subvert, rather than reinforce, the hierarchy and cultural codes at work in photographs of the nude. By “contaminating” the already overvalued genre of the human nude with an aesthetic centered on the “lowest” of social classes, Mapplethorpe’s nudes reveal, but radically destabilize, systems of representation which depend on a racial hierarchy of cultural and aesthetic value. Mercer notes that he has concentrated on black nudes for two reasons. First, as the culmination of an aesthetic strategy in which Mapplethorpe contrasted a “cool” formalism with the “hot” subject in such a way that exacerbated the ambivalence of the viewer and in which his use of often-anonymous Black male subjects could be read as a “document of relations of mutuality under shared conditions of marginality” in relation to the context of the AIDS crisis. Given this shared marginality, Mercer asks whether it is any longer tenable to suggest a privileged access to insights into the race and racism by black subjects, suggesting that the work of Julien and Fani-Fayode enable the theorization of “a more pluralistic conception of identity” which resists the legacy of black essentialist politics.
Secondly, Mercer suggests that his own reading reveals the political manifestations of repression, denial and disavowal which may be at work in the social relations of black culture with regard to its relative silence of AIDS.
Finally, Mercer notes that his rereading of the photographs is not merely “for the fun of it,” but in recognition of the political climate which may threaten a reappropriation of his views for the cultural new right.
Anti-racist satire
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Feminist Rock
Sesame Street, "I Love My Hair"Monty Python Does Masculinity
Military FairyOtherwise Hilarious For Reasons Which Should Be Somewhat Obvious
Sandra Bullock Does TransferenceART THOUGHTZ: Post-Structuralism from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.
I was born a white male. A white gay male, and I don’t celebrate being white or male. So, why should I celebrate being gay[?] That’s my opinion on the whole thing.
“As a young person, I suffered for a long time, and I suspect many people have, from being told, implicitly or explicitly, that what I am is a copy, an imitation, a derivative example, a shadow of the real.”The evidence for this in a variety of contexts I’ll take for granted – at least think about the ways in which gay (male) couples on television are often represented as heterogenderal in ways that present their relationship as a (humorously imitative or entertaining) copy of typical heterosexual gender relations: Will and Grace, the two annoying guys on Modern Family, the frumpy female friend (“fag hag,” but I think the term smacks of misogyny) of the sporty fashionable gay man, etc., etc. Extending Michael Kimmel’s discussion of masculinity (just a bit) as an exaggerated heterosexual performance that repeatedly disavows any possible femininity could get you here as well: the one who loses this men’s game has tried and failed to achieve the real, and settles, then, for an imitation.
To summarize, all of the texts we re- viewed note lesbians and gay men, almost universally in discussions of civil rights and/or equality. These discussions generally frame lesbians and gay men as “another” structurally disempowered group, often grouped with the disabled and listed after longer substantive sections on race and gender. Bisexuals are almost universally invisible and the transgendered are nowhere to be found.
Substantial portions of the discussions focus on court cases. Every text discusses Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 case in which the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s criminal ban on sodomy, and Romer v. Evans, the 1996 ruling applying equal protection to invalidate Colorado’s Amendment Two, which sought to bar the passage of local ordinances protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Depending on the edition, some texts do not yet incorporate a discussion of Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case that overturned Bowers v. Hardwick in 2003. Many texts also use the fight over same-sex marriage to illustrate full faith and credit issues. There is virtually no discussion of AIDS in these texts. Some discuss public opinion toward lesbians and gay men and some address LGBT rights as a social movement.
Most of these texts generally incorporate a lot of visuals. Only a few texts had photographs of named LGBT individuals, and three of the photos were of James Dale. [a white man - ed.] There were very few photographs of named lesbians. The most prevalent image of LGBT individuals was various versions of same-sex couples exchanging vows or rings or waiting to do so. [vomit - ed.]
On the topic of terminology, most of the texts used “homosexual” and “gay/lesbian” interchangeably. Some tended to lump everyone under “gay.” [see SURVEY FINDS DIFFERENT LEVELS OF ACCEPTANCE FOR “GAYS” VERSUS “HOMOSEXUALS” - ed.]
