Dissenting from Diagnosis: Embodiment and Visual Culture

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

In keeping with the ASA 2017 theme of pedagogies of dissent, this interdisciplinary panel explores sites of embodied dissent from diagnostic discourses—including the sexological, statistical, gynecological, and epidemiological—in aesthetics and visual culture. Working at the intersection of aesthetic and cultural production and diagnostic categories, the papers assembled here offer a rejoinder to sociological and public health concerns that have primarily produced modes of counting, hypostatizing diagnostic categories as experiential ones. Theorizations of embodied experience such as the AIDS crisis, transgender identity, female sexuality, and disability have done important work to dismantle the epistemological violence of diagnostic regimes of social apprehension, but this panel seeks to shift attention to minor genres that are co-emergent with diagnostic ways of knowing. Given the way minor aesthetic categories, including ephemera, collage, and print culture, track parallel to scientific and social scientific discourse, conditioned by and responsive to it, they are rich sites from which to generate alternatives to description as the singular form to recognize experience. For instance, Musser sees in Mickalene Thomas’s rhinestone encrusted painting of her clitoris a proposal that “pleasure comes from a refusal of the mandates of truth that are set forth in sexology,” reading how Thomas “rebuffs the suggestion of anomaly with that of pleasure.” Herring “risks the counterintuitive to ask how AIDS misinformation has been of aesthetic use” and finds one answer in the “queer poetics of misinformation discourses that were once rightly disparaged but now create unforeseen prospects for aesthetic renewal amidst diagnostic reassessment.” These papers uncover both the tension and the generative dissent at work in aesthetic representations not merely of diagnosis, but also accounts forged from within the diagnostic apparatus. For example, Lubin considers the institutional documentation of Kinsey’s house photographer William Dellenbeck, tracing how the factual protocols of sexual knowledge production shortcircuit in the photography of the staged scene of science. Vaccaro also unearths a sexological archive, the first North American Gender Identity Clinic founded in 1967 at Johns Hopkins University, looking into the drawings and doodles of its founder Dr. John Money. Across this diverse set of historical and disciplinary inquiries, these papers illustrate how the dissenting body functions as an intervention into diagnostic pedagogies, reading the constraint of diagnosis and the work born of the encounter between diagnosis and visual culture as productive to aesthetic modes of knowing, learning, and reframing. Illustrating an opening rather than a closing in the social field, visual culture is a point not just of friction with or interruption to diagnostic knowledge and classification regimes, but a pedagogical site, a place to learn from.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• John Andrews, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Individual Presentations

• Mickalene Thomas and the Science of the Rhinestone - Amber Musser, Washington University In St. Louis

• The Queer Poetics of AIDS Misinformation - Terrell Scott Herring, Indiana University Bloomington

• Visual Data: Factual Error - Joan Lubin, University of Pennsylvania

• Money’s Doodles - Jeanne Vaccaro, Indiana University Bloomington