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Damage
Notes on a Queer Aesthetic
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A personal, critical guide to seeing queer art’s wounds and possibilities
Damage asks how to look at images marked by queer pain without turning that pain into shock or pretending it isn’t there. Writer and critic Jonathan Alexander answers by pairing close looking with lived experience. The result is intimate and analytic at once, a book that stays with hard feelings while still making room for possibility.
Damage blends personal story with cultural criticism. Here, first-person stories advance the ideas. Alexander uses scenes from his life to test claims about seeing, care, and repair. The “I” works as a method that keeps theory accountable to bodies and communities, to the facts of illness, stigma, racism, and homophobia.
Across five artists, Alexander traces how damage becomes material for art and a spur to relation. With Hervé Guibert, he considers self-imaging in the AIDS era as testimony and technique. With Mark Morrisroe, he follows Polaroids and punk intimacy to find a grammar of tenderness inside grit. Laura Aguilar anchors a practice of self-portraiture that scales from a solitary body to community, land, and kinship. Carlos Martiel turns performance into a register of how nations write on bodies through race, migration, and discipline. Catherine Opie models an ethic of looking that includes self-portrait and community portrait, attending to the marks of pleasure and hurt while asking what repair might involve.
Damage is compact and teachable. Each chapter opens with a scene of looking and moves to ideas readers can use. An interlude asks how beauty persists amid harm. A closing “Aftermath” offers practical ways to stay with difficult images without going numb. The prose is precise and direct. The claims are careful. The aim is not to cure pain, but to help readers recognize it, live with it, and act in its wake.
This work is original and stimulating. The particular method of critique and address is unique—drawing from autotheory and memoir, this author explicates several artists’ work by implicating themself in both interpretation and personal consequence. This sometimes brutal dance of explication and implication is a tour de force of personal writing. At the same time, the author skillfully brings in critical theory and philosophy to make the case for a new way of encountering queer art. It’s really well-done. Specialists in rhetoric and writing studies would welcome this book as a leading example of how to do queer rhetoric instead of just talk about it.—Jacqueline Rhodes, Joan Negley Kelleher Centennial Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin
