Counterpublic and counterprivate
Zoe Leonard, David Wojnarowicz, and the political aesthetics of intimacy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4517201 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shannan Lee Hayes (Duke University, corresponding author), Max Symuleski (Duke University) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 256-275 |
| Publication date | 2019-09-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Women & Performance a journal of feminist theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0740-770X • E-ISSN: 1748-5819 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0740770x.2019.1671104 |
| OpenAlex | W2980843983 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the “counterprivate” relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation
Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Collective identity · Normative · Political science · Politics · Public space · Public sphere · Queer · Social movement · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Critical Theory and Political Philosophy · Gender Studies · History · Law · Theatre and Performance Studies
Getting Your Way
Moving Politics
Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism
Photography, the Archive, and the Question of Feminist Form
An Archive of Feelings
The Return of The Repressed
The Libidinal Constitution of a High-Risk Social Movement
The Underside of Social Movements
You see I am here after all
Mourning and Militancy
Family Values
Publics and Counterpublics
Collective Identity and Social Movements
Emotions and Social Movements
Sex in Public
Intimacy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |