viz. - gay

Difference and Desire on Display

ebfrye — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:31:03 +0000

Image Credit: Ellen DeGeneres, Kauai, Hawaii, 1997, photographed by Annie Leibovitz via NPR

At the end of October, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. opened “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” The new exhibition features gay and lesbian artists and portraits of prominent figures in the gay community.

As noted by NPR, the exhibition, given the location and the involvement of federal funds, marks a “landmark achievement.” With a tinge of pride, the Gallery states that “this is the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture.” Focuses include “how artists explored the fluidity of sexuality and gender; how major themes in modern art—especially abstraction—were influenced by social marginalization; and how art reflected society’s evolving and changing attitudes toward sexuality, desire, and romantic attachment” (National Portrait Gallery).

As the phrase “Hide/Seek” indicates, the project seems to oscillate between emphasizing various forms of “desire” and highlighting a poignant sense of public and private struggle. Tellingly, the above image of Ellen DeGeneres as photographed by Annie Leibovitz opens the exhibition’s website and emphasizes what arguably appears as the contemporary gay mainstream. A closer look at the images on display reveals a who’s who of iconic artists and intellectuals: Walt Whitman, Robert Maplethorpe, Susan Sontag, Frank O’Hara, Andy Warhol, etc. Yet, the project also features images of lesser-knowns including those lost to the AIDS epidemic.

The works of art in the exhibition are grouped along crucial periods of public gay definition, including “Before Difference,” “Stonewall and After,” and “AIDS,” which allows the exhibition to function as a documentation of gay rights. Given the National Portrait Gallery's position as a federally-funded Smithsonian museum, such historicizing and legitimizing moves take on added political significance.

Visit the websites linked above for soundslides and a closer look at the gallery. The exhibition runs through mid-February.

Protecting Marriage

EmilyBloom — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:46:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screen Shot from Pandora

While listening to Pandora the other day, an advertisement interrupted my music. This advertisement told me that my life would be happier and more successful if I commit myself to a monogamous relationship. The advertiser was a website called twoofus.org which is sponsored by the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC) and provides resources for individuals and for Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) grantees. After a little digging around, I found that the Healthy Marriage Initiative was created in 1996 with the injunction to preserve the institution of marriage because “marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” Hearing this advertisment led me to consider how the traditionally conservative pro-marriage position becomes increasingly complicated, on both the left and the right, in the context of same-sex marriage debates. Would the creators of this ad feel they had succeeded if I was now persuaded to marry my same-sex partner? Does pro-marriage mean the same thing that it did to the creator's of the Healthy Marriage Initiative in 1996?

Image Credit: Screen Shot Together in Texas

Twogether in Texas, a local HMI campaign, has billboards all over Austin with hugely inflated intimate portraits of couples. According to Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News, Twogether in Texas offers marriage workshops that are not exclusively same-sex. Although Texas has not legalized gay marriage, “non-traditional couples” can participate in these workshops that cover relationship issues such as fidelity, money management and communication. In such cases, is the pro-marriage movement symbiotic with the same-sex marriage movement? Recently, a same-sex couple, legally married in Massachusetts, filed for divorce in Dallas, further challenging the rhetorical constraints of pro-marriage positions.

Image Credit: YouTube

H/T Huffington Post

In a spoof of California’s Proposition 8, the website rescuemarriage.org presents a fake PSA in favor of a fictitious bill called the California Marriage Protection Act. This PSA uses almost identical language as those opposed to gay marriage to argue that divorce is “unnatural like polyester, glasses and twinkies.” This parody addresses the complications of pro-marriage arguments in the context of same-sex marriage debates. On the website this is even more explicit in the article “The Gay Divorcees” in which the author, John Marcotte, goes to torturous lengths to explain why a legally married same-sex couple should not be allowed a divorce because it would be a violation of traditional religious values.

Gays in Advertising

timturner — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:04:16 +0000

Hat tip to Seth Stevenson at slate.com's "Ad Report Card" for first calling my attention to this ad; I haven't actually seen it on TV:

Stevenson wonders (with others) if the ad depicts a gay couple; Progressive says it wasn't intended to, but when people started to ask questions, Stevenson notes, they began running the ad on LOGO, the cable channel aimed at LGBTQ audiences. My thoughts after the jump.

This discussion made me think about the kinds of cues that "count" as gay in visual analysis. Here, the evidence includes what may be a rainbow on the shorter guy's t-shirt (mostly obscured by his jacket) and the gaydar bells set off for some viewers by the taller guy. (Stevenson dissects all the possible evidence).

Having taught classes on gender and sexuality in the past, it occurred to me that this ad (or other gay or ambiguously gay ads) might be an interesting way to open up classroom discussions about stereotyping on the one hand and the performative elements of gender and sexuality on the other hand. This discussion, with some finesse, could include either a discussion of portrayals of LGBTQ people in media or the ways audience response to such portrayals is conditioned by the assumptions about sexuality or gender that each viewer brings to the ad. That is, rather than just focusing on whether the ad itself is gay, the instructor might be able to turn the tables and ask how the ad itself constructs the viewer/student. For example, what is it about the taller guy that suggests homosexuality to some viewers? Eliciting student responses to this question could perhaps lead to some useful deconstruction of gender/sexuality norms. I'm not suggesting that the ad is guilty of stereotyping, or that any discussion of whether the guys are gay is stereotyping, either. I'm more interested in the ways discussion of the ad might open up a conversation about why some things count as stereotyping when others don't, or why some viewers will see "gay" when others won't. Context could also be key to this discussion; for example, does the "obvious" meaning of the ad change for a viewer who sees the ad on Logo vs. a viewer who sees the ad run during the Super Bowl? (Please forgive me for engaging in a little straight stereotyping myself.) And how are all these questions, or the responses they elicit, perceptibly or imperceptibly charged with the value judgments that attach to our notions of gender and sexuality?

The ad could also lead to some discussion about close reading, visual rhetoric, and "secret coding." That is, first it could be pointed out that it does take a fairly careful viewing to notice the ad's supposed "gay" aspects. But secondly, some audience members might miss the cues even on careful viewing--for example, anyone who doesn't know that the rainbow (barely visible here, after all) is sometimes used as a symbol for the LGBTQ community.

Instructors interested in this stuff may want to check out other gay ads archived at the Commercial Closet, and check out this assignment (link opens .pdf) on gender roles in advertising. After I read this, however, I immediately thought of another, classic ambiguously gay duo, the Da Da Da Volkswagen guys:

Visual Rhetoric and Invisibility

Sarah Wagner — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:18:28 +0000

Where is the line between visual and textual rhetoric? A brief event brought this question up for me on a personal level recently.

I was on the phone with the IRS and they asked me two questions. First, is my last name my married name or my maiden name? Second, on my last return, how did I file? The answer I gave to the first was “married” and to the second was “single”. And I'm being forced to lie, or rather, to leave out part of the story. Sure, the IRS woman doesn't care--married people file single every day--but I hate it. Time after time, I have to answer questions like those the same way. I'm not single, I've been married for three years, and was with my wife for seven before that. My maiden name is my married name; my wife took my last name. D'you see? I'm a woman (if you didn't catch the byline), and I married another woman in Massachusetts before we moved to Texas. Here, I'm married only because I say so. Here, I'm “married.”

So why does this have anything to do with visual rhetoric? Because in one sense it has something very much to do with visibility. I'm not only not married because the text of many of our laws says I'm can't be, but because others' ability to picture in their heads a woman saying “My wife and I were talking the other day...” affects their ability to accept my reality. And it's my inability too: back in Massachusetts, there was a columnist—I forget the name—who wrote every so often for the back page of the Sunday magazine. The back page was on relationships, and this writer was great. Not once, but twice, I thought, “I have to remember to read this writer more often”, and when I looked for the byline, I was caught off guard both times because this person writing “My husband does this and that” was a man.

Another case of visibility--or rather, invisibility--is when I fill out a form. Just take the word “form”: there's form and then there's content, right? So the expectation of the folks handing out and filling out forms is that there will be certain predictable requests for information. We don't read forms for content—we look to see which line takes our name, whether there are brackets for our area code, and so on. The extra boxes giving us more choices to identify ourselves are equally visual arguments. If we agree you exist--Pacific Islanders, “Other” ethnicities, gays and lesbians--you get a box of your own. Again, it's about whether or not people can envision me. Can they picture my relationship in their heads?