Opacities

An Introduction

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8093147
AutoresZach Blas (autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen31
Número2
Páginas149-153
Fecha de publicación2016-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCamera Obscura Feminism Culture and Media Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0270-5346 • E-ISSN: 1529-1510
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/02705346-3592499
OpenAlexW2520624880
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas17

This introduction proposes opacity as a generative and necessary frame for contemporary feminist and queer politics. Theorized by the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, opacity can be understood as an incalculable alterity that is at once the relational ontology of the world, an ethical demand, a form of political legitimation, and a poetics. In this “In Practice” collection, opacity is offered as an alternative to the familiar terrain of identity, visibility, and representation in feminist and queer politics and writing. Contributors utilize opacity as both a tactic and a material condition to address issues of surveillance, the nonhuman, and contemporary art. Jennifer Rhee considers clothing that evades drone detection, while Zach Blas and Jacob Gaboury discuss biometric facial recognition and masked protest. Jasmina Tumbas and Jemima Wyman claim camouflage as a refusal of the female body's objectification and also a catalyst for collectivization. Heather Davis argues that plastic is an opaque queerness, and Nathan Lee writes on the condition of being HIV undetectable as an optimistic imperceptible relationship to one's body. Across these texts, opacity operates as an expansive theory, politics, and aesthetics that works against the totalizing gaze of global surveillance and also demands a place for the nonhuman in feminist and queer thought

Aesthetics · Alterity · Art · Epistemology · Identity (music · Literature · Objectification · Opacity · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism