“Pleasure Manifesto”
by Christopher Reed
The topics of the presentations at the “Queer Visualities” conference ranged from Asian cinema to Renaissance painting, and from the Statue of Liberty to television. Among the many provocative asides in Erica Rand’s exhilarating paper on Lady Liberty was her remark that she does not feel like an art historian any more. I won’t put words in Erica’s mouth -- she’s got plenty of her own -- so I’ll assert that queering the conventional boundaries of art, and of art historical practice, to include uncanonic art and popular visual culture is a good thing. But it raises dicey questions about the scholar’s traditional status as an exemplary viewer, more sensitive to and knowledgeable about what s/he looks at than previous scholars or the average audience.
Popular culture makes these questions most acute. Its most devoted connoisseurs and expert commentators often work outside the academy -- and may not consider what they (or we) do to be “work” at all. What is our relation to these other queer viewers? Or to non-queer viewers of queerness? We are poorly served by models of disciplinary rigor from academics in television studies. I say this having read a lot of this material while co-authoring an article on “Will and Grace” recently. Their analyses were almost uniformly premised on a stance of haughty disapproval toward commercial entertainment as a conservative force brainwashing the naive common viewer in a way the privileged researcher is uniquely qualified to understand, not through any kind of empirical research, but intuitively, as a mode of viewing. Anxieties about constructing a professional identity in relation to practices associated with leisure seem to have generated compensatory rhetorics of an individual’s “work” in a “field” to “uncover” or “unpack” pre-existing “problematics” around popular imagery. Such formulations mitigrate against the possibility that scholars might participate with other viewers to imagine or create pleasurefully subversive or empowering interpretations of visual culture. Dismissing such scholarship as irrelevant to our project, my co-author and I probably should not have been surprised to find our media-studies counterparts were horrified by our thesis and methods: we liked “Will and Grace” and argued it did good cultural work. We quoted from chat-rooms devoted to the program to explore how fans make the show meaningful in their own lives. We used that to speculate about its effects in creating and sustaining queer community (the paper, “Ah yes, I remember it well: memory and queer culture in ‘Will & Grace’,” co-authored with Christopher Castiglia, was commissioned by GLAAD and is summarized on their website).
Our experience goes to the heart of a number of questions that kept popping up during the conference. How can we engage pleasure when it has been excluded from many models of scholarly discipline? What is our relationship to viewers outside an academic elite? And the related question, repeatedly put by Jonathan Katz, of the relationship between academic practices and activism? In an effort at an answer that recognizes the relationship among these issues, I would suggest that what art historians can offer is training in an academic tradition that, probably more than any other, values pleasure. It’s easy to condescend to “art appreciation” classes for good reasons having to do with their conventional organization around an exclusive canon. But the basic goal of that pedagogy -- of which most art historians have had some experience -- is to open people to new theories and practices of pleasure. When we condescend to that, we accept a model of professionalism that mistakes negativity for critical rigor. Instead, I hope we can exploit our training in “appreciation,” enriched by linguistic, psychoanalytic, or other theories of pleasure, to enlarge the range and depth of queer pleasures.
If art historians have anything to offer the broad community of queer viewers, then, it is pleasureful forms of queer viewing: pleasure in the reception of self-consciously queer products of queer image-makers (both currently and throughout our often-repressed history), as well as campier pleasures in queering spectacles not intended for us. By the same token, if we have anything with which to combat anti-queer cultural forces, it is the spectacle of us, as queer people, having a wonderful time. That spectacle of pleasure was crucial to the activist successes of the feminist, gay, lesbian, and queer movements from the late 1960s to the early 1990s (does anyone ever talk about how much fun we had?). If we are to regain the activist momentum we have lost over the past decade, we need to value our own performances of pleasure in queer viewing and to nurture queer pleasures in those around us. Let art historians show the way!
Chris Reed
reed@lfc.edu