ABSTRACTS

PANEL 1 MEMORY AND DISAPPEARANCE

IRON FRAME: DAY’S END AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF QUEER MEMORY

DENNIS OHM | Anthropology, McGill University

This paper examines Day’s End (2021), David Hammons’ monumental steel outline of the demolished Pier 52 on Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront. In the 1970s, the Piers were a crucial space for queer and trans social life before they were targeted by policing and redevelopment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and visual-cultural analysis, the paper considers how the Whitney Museum has framed Hammons’ work as a “mnemonic device” for the Piers’ history, even as it stands within a landscape that displaced the very communities it commemorates. Reading Hammons’ piece alongside Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End (1975), the analysis traces how both interventions navigate the tensions between building and unbuilding, commemoration and erasure, and how Hammons’ oblique authorship and refusals complicate the museum’s commemorative script. It follows how meaning is projected into, and at times deflected by, an empty frame.

ANTICIPATING DISAPPEARANCES IN SEX AND MUSIC

WILLIAM HUNT | Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

In this presentation Hunt will theorize a temporality of infinite-finitude emanating from acts of aesthetic figuration (music and sex, both improvised), opening onto a reckoning with the continuous and discontinuous commons of history (lived experience and memory of past and imminent disappearances) as traversed by an array of projections—always from the present into both the past and the future. Animating this sense of temporality, and its reckoning with the projection of “possibility,” is a deep respect for, and enjoyment of, the finite sense of the actual-present, and the infinite virtual-past and -future (asymmetrical, yet isomorphic). Hunt’s presentation seeks to outline the improvisational temporality of sex and music beyond the projection of discrete “possibilities,” where what is at stake is a sense of common trust and a non-coercive rapport with the to-come and the past. In other words: How might sex and music be ways of anticipating disappearance without foreclosing its infinite indeterminacy?

PANEL 2 NARCISSISM AND PORTRAITURE

BERSANI’S AIDS PORTRAIT

BEN KOONAR | Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Leo Bersani’s phrase depicting “a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (Rectum, 1987) is “one of queer theory’s primal scenes” (Jagose) but it has never been read as a literary AIDS portrait before. Bersani wrote studies of some of the 19th and 20th Centuries’ greatest literary portraitists (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Lawrence), and his phrase mobilizes many of the aesthetic strategies and conventions that he credits to these writers. The phrase also responds to the rhetoric and visual culture of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, providing an alternative to both the ubiquitous trope of the AIDS victim and the heroic depictions that would become the main activist rebuttal. By recognizing the influence of Bersani’s earlier criticism of literary portraits, and the intervention in the visual vocabulary of AIDS portraiture, I develop a new account of the portrait’s enduring force.

THE WAIT OF NARCISSUS — INFINITELY

GUSTAVO HAIDEN DE LACERDA | Communication Studies, McGill University

In a small storage room at the Pinacoteca of São Paulo, Hudinilson Jr. plays naked with a photocopying machine. The year was 1980 and a military dictatorship had been in power for over a decade. Coming out of this erotic encounter with a photocopier, the series Exercícios de me ver [Exercises in seeing myself] opens itself onto a series of questions: why does this narcissistic scene so corporeally rely on a medium of reproduction such as the photocopier, one that requires both waiting and repetition? How do the medial and aesthetic affordances of xerography imprint the pictures of the body that imprints itself upon the machine? What is it to wait for one’s own image in the form of a series? Is there One to wait and own it? What does one await after all? This paper approaches Hudinilson’s photographic seriality through its connection to the notions of waiting and infinity. By looking at and into the Exercises in Seeing Myself series, and by answering the Badiouan call for a ‘secularized’ concept of the infinite, we are left with the task and the risk of infinitely looking at some-one’s image and being caught glimpsing at the wasteful eroticization of time it implies.

PANEL 3 RISK AND THE GAZE

A THANATOLOGY OF LOOKING: NOPE (2022)

MARCUS PRASAD | Communication Studies, McGill University

Jacques Lacan imbues the act of looking with something threatening when he names the scopic drive, an impetus that establishes a distance between a subject seeing the world “objectively” and the effects of the gaze that trouble that very pursuit. The scopic determines that vision is a product of both looking with one’s eyes and the unknowable work of the gaze, establishing the visual field as a series of deceptions warped by the function of desire. With desire wedded to vision as such, how do we account for the visual nature of a subject position constituted by the act of looking and being looked at, which itself is filled with disarticulating traps? How is power manifest across subjects, across objects, between one that looks at the other and one that looks back? Where does the scopic, the drive to look, exceed the vitality of the subject in the visual realm toward self-destruction?

These and other related questions are addressed in this paper through Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) and its representation of black subjectivity alongside and against the drive to look at what one shouldn’t, considering what takes place when the reciprocated look between subjects is inflected by an annihilating gaze in the domain of the Other. By framing the film’s alien antagonist as the purveyor of this gaze, I explore how Nope presents a circumventing of the look’s annihilating totality unique to its black protagonists. This rejection of spectacle, of recognition and confirmation by the Other through relinquishing the desire to look and subsequently capture, begins to foment an ethics of signification under the experience of ab-sens, which David S. Marriott defines as the black subject’s hiddenness, or which Lee Edelman defines as its nonrelation to meaning, its inability to be spoken yet still somehow signified. Pointing to an “outside” of signification, I explore how Peele’s film indexes the failure of the Symbolic to account for the marker of race. In this way, Nope establishes a telos of subjective formation in the visual field that takes into account the disarticulating effects of the desire to look, almost transgressing them entirely to assert that certain signifiers of subjectivity, namely blackness, are excluded from such a logic from the start.

“GENERALLY HAPPY”: MARK AGUHAR AND THE RISK OF BEING MISTAKEN

NATHAN CLARK | Art History, University of Toronto

On March 4th 2012, one week before she died, Filipinx transgender artist Mark Aguhar posted that she wants to be a “girl androgyn who gets mistaken for a boy,” producing works where she, through her body, explores themes of becoming an object of sexual desire under the risk of being perceived by the male gaze. I argue that Mark’s invitation to mistake her womanly body for a boy’s produces what I call scenes of risk, or what Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, sees as vulnerabilities which challenge “cruel optimisms,” fantasies of a “good life.” In the period Mark worked, the cruel optimism is the so-called “Transgender Tipping Point,” a period of increasing transgender visibility characterized by a fantasy of “general happiness” inhabited by visible transgender bodies which otherwise “pass,” or are socially imperceptible. I examine how Mark, through her risk of being an object of sexual desire, exposes the transgender “good life” as a paradoxical impasse of excessive false promises that the increasing visibility of otherwise imperceptible trans bodies promises social progress. These fantasies of making passing visible, I argue, often obscure the finitude of transfeminine reality–that the risk of visibility (of being mistaken) often leads to sexual and physical violence against transfeminine bodies.

PANEL 4 INFINITY AND UNDETECTABILITY

INFINITY POOLS

EMMA BLACKETT | Communication Studies , McGill University

This paper considers real-estate reality TV show Selling Sunset’s obsessive hypervaluation of an object that figures ecological limit and limitlessness with equal extravagance: the infinity pool with an ocean view. I read the sea-viewing infinity pool—built into California hillsides that are burning even in winter and episodically slipping away into the very matter of the view—as synecdoche for and fetish of the socio-subjective condition under which sunset may be so prodigally sold, a condition I am calling solar melancholia. Here, solar figures the subject’s melancholic penchant not, in the face of ecological collapse, to dwell or conserve, but, in the mode of something like pure desire (and thus also of drive), to burn through things, to eat continually; and such is the glorious paradox of her being, the flesh of the body diminishes with the eating and becomes ever more sharply contoured. While the sun gives without ever receiving, the solar melancholic—both anorexic and insatiable, fashioned in glittering garments that are becoming more and more sculptural—amasses wealth in the negative space where her living tissue recedes. The infinity pool’s perfect blue of loss and longing shines, impels, swells with its abundance of necromantic value. Endlessly desire bleeds over the glass edge, sustained by the superfluity of its non-object, which vanishes unbroken, as if to herald the subject’s oceanic spill over the threshold of the visible world. 

EXHIBITING THE UNDETECTABLE

ALPER TURAN | Art History, University of Toronto

Undetectability is a loaded mode of absence. This paper proposes undetectability as an aesthetics of finite exposure and a tactic of counter-visibility in contested publics that resist the demands of capture and recognition. Building on my curatorial projects—Positive Space (Istanbul, 2018), A Finger for an Eye (Istanbul, 2021), and Not Everything is Given (New York, 2024)—I trace how undetectability moves between the viral and the visual through different strategies: contaminating the public with artworks that mobilize viral metaphors without viral loads; abstraction and camouflage as forms of self-censorship that elude detection while asserting queer presence; and withholding testimony as resistance to the demand for consumable narratives of suffering, against the extractive gaze and the performative satisfaction of “compassion,” which, as Lauren Berlant reminds us, often emerges from privilege and distances the spectator from true commitment. Across these contexts, exhibitions open onto undetectability as a force that exposes hiddenness—not through disclosure, but through appearance in withdrawal, intimacy in opacity, and refusal as form.

PANEL 5 INTIMACY AND RELATIONAL FRICTIONS

IRRITATING FRIENDS

COLIN BUIST | Art History, University of Toronto

After AIDS, cultural perspectives regarding gay male sociality and sexuality have maintained a rather irritating paradox: that gay men are both repulsed by yet devoted to women. On one hand, there is the accusation that, because of the exclusionary, all-male world of gay sex, gay men have no commitment to women, let alone transgender. In fact, worse than their inherent misogyny, some gay men have been apprehended as “essentialist villains” (Bersani). On the other, some gay men have been criticized for their commitment to gay cultural practices of drag or diva worship. Interested in reconceptualizing gay men’s troublesome relation to misogyny and effeminacy, my paper reflects on other relations that gay men form with women—particularly friendship—alongside the work of artist Robert Blanchon (1965-1999), specifically his music videos, all of which are set to love songs sung by women. Focusing on mourning (1997), an unfinished video made in collaboration with his friend, Kelly Marie Martin, where she films him on a handheld camcorder lip-syncing to a four-song playlist around cruising sites throughout Los Angeles, I suggest that the video presents a view of gay male sociality and sexuality from a “woman’s perspective.” In so doing, I propose an understanding of friendship as an experience with “frictions of otherness” (Bersani), where something like irritation is regarded not as aggressive opposition or hostile antagonism, but as a form of intimacy, perhaps even love.

MAGIC INTERMINABLE: ANALYSIS AS HYPNOTIC ENCOUNTER

SOFIA DI GIRONIMO | Comparative Literature, Emory University

Sleep, the hypnotist commands, like a mother lulling her baby. Withdraw all attention from the world outside, focus solely on me. The hypnotic encounter is a model form of the love encounter, in which we allow ourselves to be entered by and to enter another. Freud’s abandonment of hypnosis served too as a starting point for psychoanalysis, which he hoped would distance his practice from a certain mysterious element that plagued hypnotic practice. The hypnotist’s imposition is one of a gaze that need return no love: the revenant of a relation to the primal father. The archaic encounter that forms the basis for relation as such is re-enacted in the hypnotic relationship. The transference of hypnosis is a return, one to an archaic phase, beyond remembering. If the distinction between psychoanalysis and hypnosis rests on the success the analyst finds in working through transference, then the two are perhaps doomed to entwinement. The successful resolution of the transference in analysis depends on the analyst’s own self-analysis, a lifelong labour, an interminable task. But transference itself is essentially hypnotic, a repetition of an archaic first encounter. The regress is not infinite, but finite. The unresolvability of the analytic encounter is that of a forever-re-encountering, an encounter that precedes our own birth, and yet stretches us forward, demanding the work of analysis as interminable task.

PANEL 6 NATALITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL EROTICS

QUEER(ING) NATALITY: UNTIMELY DESIRE, OR AN AESTHETICS OF DISCONSENT

RAN DENG | Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

How does one consent to being born, especially in a world where each birth is contingent on selection, annihilation, and its own (in)capacity of and (lack of) investment in biological reproduction? Thinking alongside this question, I investigate the stakes of reproductive desire in relation to dystopic visions of the future. This paper analyzes Li Kotomi’s 2021 speculative fiction, Confirmation of Intent to be Born, which imagines a world in which parents must obtain fetuses’ consent before they are legally permitted to give birth. In the novel, the womb is conceived not as an instrument of birth but as a transitory dwelling, wherein biological reproduction suggests finitude rather than repetition and duplicity. Through a reading of the pregnant protagonist’s ambivalence about birth and desire, I propose an aesthetic of dis-consent that detaches birth from the socio-political imperatives of maternal labor.

BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE AND OIL RIG SEX: CHINA MIÉVILLE’S “COVEHITHE” AND THE FANTASY OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

HUI WONG | Film and Media , University of California, Berkeley

How might we read China Miéville’s short story “Covehithe,” in which sunken oil rigs come to life? A number of readings locate in the text an environmental ethics that sees the oil rigs as uncanny nonhuman agents that intervene in anthropocentric thinking, instantiating the truth of willful ignorance about environmental harm by making visible previously unseen environmental damage. In this paper, I suggest that these claims are best described as the fantasy of environmental justice: that is, the wish—persistent since the beginning of environmental activism—that all it takes for environmental consciousness is, precisely, that “the environment” be brought to consciousness through scientific and public communication. This paper draws together this fantasy with a figure that is central to Miéville’s text: the “inhuman pornography of great slams and grinding,” of oil rig sex and reproduction. The sexual aspect of these oil rigs plays a central role in understanding how exactly “Covehithe” services claims about knowing more so that the environment can be saved. I argue that Miéville contrasts two positions to projects of knowledge in the face of machine sex: an institutional one that seeks to sublimate this machinic-sexual strangeness through knowledge, and one, concomitantly produced with the former, that seems to imply that what is compelling about environmental justice is the persistence of an outside of the horizon of consciousness.

PANEL 7 BLACKNESS AND DANCE

THE FLESHINESS OF THE BLACK PSYCHE IN BLACK MIRROR’S BLACK MUSEUM

KEVIN AH-SEN | Communication Studies, McGill University

Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a speculative fictional anthology series, draws from our problems, failures and the murky ethics surrounding the use and responsibility of technological advancement. What is elided from such reference and extrapolation of our contemporary moment is the problem of race. Such elision functions as a rupture, where the suppression of race simultaneously unveils it as a primary concern. This paper offers a close reading of this very rupture in season four’s final episode titled “Black Museum.” In a seemingly postracial universe where the transferring of the psyche from humans into other human and non-human vessels is possible and unexceptional, where one’s “soul” is sustained beyond one’s physical death, this paper extends the question of enslavability and violability of the black psyche. Drawing on Hortense J. Spillers’s articulation, “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’” this paper posits the fleshiness of the black psyche as a problem for thought, specifically thinking about the character, Clayton Leigh, who was reincarnated in holographic form upon his execution and his captivity and suffering as sites of antiblack enjoyment and (digital qua infinite) reproduction of the ungendered slave.

I WANNA BE READY . . . I ALREADY AM

MARTIN AUSTIN | Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Toronto

A solo entitled “I Wanna Be Ready” is arguably the climax of choreographer Alvin Ailey’s 1960 masterwork, Revelations. Stripped of all stagecraft save for a solitary spotlight, a man dressed in all-white stays mostly crouched to the floor, making subtle gestures as a hymn proselytizes on the eventuality of death. While Mr. Ailey clearly intended to confront audiences with their finitude when “I Wanna Be Ready” first premiered, his own death from AIDS nearly 30 years later also feels hauntingly foreshadowed: particularly because the climax of Revelations is more libidinal than perhaps originally intended. This paper presentation concerns this instance where knowledge of queer sex is only confirmed in death when a body of work is all that remains (Phelan 1997) and explores how dance instead enables an aesthetic of sex to emerge beyond knowledge through encounters with the body’s opacity (Saketopoulou 2023). Utilizing choreographic analysis alongside archival materials recently presented at the Whitney Museum’s Edges of Ailey exhibition, I consider how the queer aesthetics present in Revelations mirror much the same queer ethics that occur in everyday practices at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, reflecting Bersani’s proposal that aesthetic experiences inspire us to ‘choreograph ourselves into being.’ Ultimately, I look to “I Wanna Be Ready” as a crucial example of choreography’s historical purpose: to ensure that dance can live on beyond “the certainty of the future death of the choreographer” (Lepecki 2006, 27).