Queer look, Future Anterior and the Image of War
Queer look, Future Anterior and the Image of War

Summary/Abstract: How can contemporary representations of war be reflected from a gendered and sexualized perspective? I intend to enter the visual and discursive field of war through the narratives/images of sexualized violence and especially their artistic reconfigurations. My starting point is the assumption that sexual violence is currently constructed as a field of trauma. This construction happens mainly through the claim of (especially visual) unrepresentability and the unbearable confrontation with the entanglement of sexuality and violence. It generally neglects narratives of survivors who indeed very often find a way to describe, narrate and represent their experience. Searching for a queer and feminist response to current representations of sexualized violence in times of war by means of art the text attempts to activate Sanja Ivekovic’s techniques of looking and imagining. I suggest reinterpreting the images of the contemporary fashion industry (like Sanja Ivekovic did) and their explicit connection to images of war distributed in the media, as empowering re-stagings of sexualized violence. With this proposition I intend to challenge the viewer to imagine additional layers of image in order to insert a queer practice of looking, and reopen the position of the viewer to ethical responsiveness. For that purpose, I examine Steven Meisel’s iconography of images of war in fashion photography through their atmosphere of futurism or science fiction. As a consequence, I examine the potentiality of a different future past (future anterior) as a crucial temporality of both photography and queer S/M practices, which reflect back on historical events and painful experiences. The last part of the text examines my own artwork, the photo installation “Future Anterior –Illustrations of War” in which I insert short texts based on future anterior into fragments of Steven Meisel’s photographs.

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