Wild Refractions and the “Cut of Continuity”:  Queer Possibilities for “Seeing/Feeling" in a Regime of Distortion

• In Event: Crafting “Apertures toward freedom”: Creative Strategies for Imagining and Enacting radical Change

Abstract

I consider a politics of perception at the threshold of the visible (Silverman 1995), as pivotal to a sensate democracy (Butler 2006). Specifically, I introduce a third-space practice, wild refracting, to focus on that which has been rendered singular. Wild refraction requires ways of “seeing/feeling" that refuse terrorizing fictions, reject limiting dichotomies, and attend to those invisibilized, overlooked, unseen, or objectified in the current regime of distortion. These queer practices, tied to the generative potential of the “cut of continuity” (Campt 2012) and a rejection of the sutured image, must include the affective and attend meaningfully to multiplicity.

Presenter

• Adela C. Licona, University of Arizona