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Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora
Abstract
In Unruly Visions Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, these cultural forms—which Gopinath conceptualizes as aesthetic practices of queer diaspora—reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories. Countering standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation-state, as well as familiar formulations of queerness that ignore regional gender and sexual formations, she stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Gopinath shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality. The queer optics produced by these visual practices creates South-to-South, region-to-region, and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.
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“Such a multi-focused visuality does not strive for normalization but instead aims to render visible the precarity of lives that suffer dispossession and displacement (Gopinath, 2018: 174).”
From Border countervisuality: smartphone videos of border crossing and migration (2023) · cites this paper as Gopinath, 2018: 174
In the citing paper
“Gopinath (2018) argues that the disordered, chaotic, multifocused, and unruly mode of vision creates a productive vantage point for seeing and sensing a world that is unimaginable for the normative and focused lens.”
From Border countervisuality: smartphone videos of border crossing and migration (2023) · cites this paper as Gopinath (2018)
In the citing paper
“Moreover, the shakiness of the smartphone videos resonates with other forms of deviant visuality that counter forward-looking, normalizing, and controlling forms of vision.”
From Border countervisuality: smartphone videos of border crossing and migration (2023) · cites this paper as Gopinath (2018)
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Metadata
- Authors
- Gopinath, G.
- Corresponding author
- Gopinath, Gayatri
- Venue
- Duke University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- 2018-11-16
- OpenAlex
- W4229564790
- Cited by
- 146
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 34 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 33 · 2020: 22 · 2019: 13
- FWCI
- 19.11
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Duke University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender and Feminist Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Cultural Studies and Colonialism
- Keywords
- queer diaspora, queer visual culture, visuality, affect, archives, settler colonialism, racialization, diaspora art, Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari
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