Tales of here and later coded forms of queer counter-visuality

Abstract

This text and project in its explorations, failures, inquiries and anxiety seeks to feel, touch and animate a working queer space of counter visuality and its sites of resistance against dominant practices of historical visualization. Through a nuanced practice of coding, in bodily performance, language and associations of space and time, queerness has managed to avoid specific associations to historical periods while creating some of the most influential cultural manifestations that have consistantly resisted power structures and the contemporary economies of the image. This paper will explore in detail how we visualize a lived experience – queerness – while further coding it to counter dominant forms of visual language that have a great deal to gain from the monetizing of such an identity. The text while grappling with these structures of language and form will furthernavigate the ambivalence of queer desire, the often unspoken violence in intimacy, and the way outing visibility can be as destructive as it can be productive. These nuanced and often highly personal experiences will take form through a process of cutting, hiding and revealing, using a shifting coded visual language that will haunt the text. This is a refusal of a linear reading as the only productive means of engagement in understanding in full the relationship between each coded layer, between queerness and our bodies, spatial communities and time. These are tales, haunted stories, of a place where body, history and time blend into one another. You will come to know these ghost that haunt as the three sisters, each with a tale of here and later.