“I'm Hard to Catch”

This article examines Living with Pride: Ruth C. Ellis @ 100 (1999) by Yvonne Welbon, an independent documentary film centered on the life of African American lesbian centenarian Ruth Ellis to advance a queer of color theory of longevity. The analysis closely considers Ruth Ellis's assertion in the film that she: “. . . wasn't in—What you call it? . . . Closet. Never.” Although Ellis explicitly disavows “the closet” declaring instead that she was never in it, both in the film and commonly she is often referred to as “out.” The article addresses the ways in which “out,” along with Ellis's declarations of “never” and “wasn't in,” examined together as “never in,” render Ellis's living legible within black sexuality studies and LGBTQ cultural politics. Ellis advises at the end of the film that cultivating “atmosphere” interpersonally in daily life engenders longevity. Living with Pride puts forth a model of longevity that is personally and collectively grounded in black sexual difference and queer of color resistant social practices that trouble public health life expectancy discourses. Drawing on queer of color critique, black sexuality studies, and visual cultural studies, the article engages Ellis's formulation of black queer atmosphere as a site of imagining that advances the livability of racialized sexual difference.

Photogenic Urban Landscapes: Towards an Intermedial Framework for Landscape Criticism in the Age of Social Media

Drawing on cultural geography, visual cultural studies and theories of media ecology, this essay lays out a framework for collaboration between media scholars, architects and critics, positioning photographic social media such as Instagram as a means for pursuing questions about the changing role of landscape in the visual mediation of urban social life and public culture. While buildings and urban infrastructure also have mediating functions, I focus on designed landscapes such as public parks because they mediate visual perception in a manner that is historically intertwined with that of photography. Responding to existing interest in the critical reading of landscape values as well as research on new photographic forms and practices arising from social media use, I suggest that we take seriously the idea that landscape is itself a form of media. Attending to its ongoing interactions with other media will enable us both to specify the nature of its intermediality in a given time and place, and open a new space for reflexivity and critique. Beginning with an account of what is at stake in the visual mediation accomplished through urban landscapes on the one hand, and in the study of social media use on the other, I make a case for a critical, qualitative analysis of photographic content as opposed to quantitative analytics of the data associated with it. I then present an example of the kind of analysis I have in mind, drawing from an exploratory case study of photographs from Grand Park in Los Angeles (Rios Clementi Hale). In the process, I flesh out the concept of intermediality as it pertains to designed landscapes and demonstrate the kinds of questions and pedagogical opportunities such an approach may open.

Surveilling Social Difference: Black Women’s "Alley Work" in Industrializing Minneapolis

This article examines the arrest records of black women who worked as sex workers in downtown Minneapolis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were referred to as “alley workers.” I demonstrate the ways in which black women’s alley work documents the coming together of photography and surveillance as constitutive of the broader project of the modernization of police work through the procedures of standardization offered by the Bertillon System of Criminal Identification. I draw on women of color feminism, visual cultural studies, and critical race studies to analyze the alley work historical archive as a representational account of black women’s sexual regulation. My argument is that the Bertillon system’s attempts to categorize alley work functions as a strategy of surveillance that regulates black women’s economic and social difference. The police’s efforts to identify alley work as economically transgressive positions black sexual labor as an unruly site of social management in the context of industrializing Minneapolis.

La scène comme nouvelle culture visuelle : entre effervescence urbaine, visibilité et circulation des images numériques

L’étude des scènes culturelles apparue dans les années quatre-vingt-dix a été rapidement assimilée au champ des popular music studies et ce, dans une volonté de trouver une alternative aux notions de contre- ou de sous-culture. La polysémie et la malléabilité du terme ont ainsi donné lieu à des efforts souvent disparates ayant pour thème la sonorité ou le « son » d’une ville. Or si le son rythme bel et bien l’urbanité et lui donne son effervescence, n’y a-t-il pas lieu également de s’interroger sur la manière dont les images fournissent davantage qu’un simple décor en donnant précisément vie et corps à la ville ? L’objectif de ce texte est de réfléchir au concept de scène à partir d’une focale encore sous-exploitée, à savoir celle des visual cultural studies. Comment l’image devient-elle performative et comment entre-t-elle en scène formant du coup une sorte de surproduction culturelle ? Comment la circulation des images peut-elle engendrer de nouvelles expériences de socialité ? Le propos est illustré à partir de l’étude du Street art et plus particulièrement du calligraffiti à Montréal — mais également dans la manière dont ce dernier trouve échos à Paris, Beyrouth et Tunis. En tant qu’articulation du local, du translocal et du virtuel, cette pratique émergente doit permettre de comprendre comment la circulation et la mise en visibilité des images, dans un contexte contemporain d’hétérogénéité culturelle, d’hybridation artistique et de controverses sociales, peut susciter de nouveaux enjeux et codes politico-culturels.