Two Pieces I Wish I Had Run Into Earlier:
Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture by Rosemary Hennessy:
https://www-jstor-org.occ.idm.oclc.org/stable/pdf/1354421.pdf
Queer Spirits by AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs
(I ordered it here: https://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=2079&menu=0)
The first piece, an article from the 90s, critiques queerness as a commodified identity. A fetishized identity (a stable identity, unaffected by power/class relationships), for Hennessy, is one that is aestheticized, and then commodified. Queer identity becomes one that “retains the structure of commodity exchange.” Queer identity, therefore, can become aestheticized through consumer choices. Hennessy would not like “rainbow capitalism:” an “artful life” would exclude the working class, she says, and calls for a view of lesbians, gays, and queers “who are manual workers, sex workers, unemployed, and imprisoned.” By calling for this, Hennessy complicates queer identity: not merely constituted by desire and its object, but by the socio/cultural/class relationships that determine “lifestyle” in the first place.
I believe that queer photography in the late 90s and 2000s answered Hennessy’s article quite well. Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley, Dash Snow. Although not necessarily queer, I think of Gillian Wearing, Boris Mikhalov, or Santiago Sierra, who photograph people on the margins. Or, turning back to the queers, think of Catherine Opie, Jess T. Dugan, or Lorenzo Triburgo.
The second book, published in June 2011, follows five “Invocations” to conjur queer and marginalized spirits, and enact a secret group ritual. The book is esoteric, with belated (or completely absent) documentation of these rituals. An invocation is performed. A vow is performed. The rituals, Bronson says elsewhere, heal.
I have not finished the book; I am in the middle of it. But here, we find a construction of queer identity that (while aestheticized, especially presented in an Art Book, which Hennessy seems to mistrust) escapes a commodity-capitalism determination (a true Marxist might suggest that this spiritual practice conceals class and labor relationships, but no one is a true Marxist). No shopping malls here, nor forms of literal and photographic representation of the rituals (keeping them esoteric, and thus, uncommodifiable): just a “declaration of the brotherhood of the anus.” An attempt for that community to bond, and reach towards its own fragmented ancestry...a queerness expanding its identity beyond a commodity culture.
More to come...I need to finish the Queer Spirits book. But it is giving me joy for now, and I thought it might be worth noting these two pieces, and putting them in a sort of conversation.