‘Vampiric’ Aesthetics in Jack Smith’s Film(s) – A Critique of Queer/Trans Representation
Präsentation
Maré Tulio Jenzer
Im Rahmen der Konferenz Ethics of Queeer In/Visibility an der Universität Heidelberg.
https://queer-in-visibility.de/
Abstract
Building on the discourse around the efficacy of representational justice (see deLire 2023, Koch-Rein et al. 2020, Billard et al. 2020), I examine the extent to which the analysis of aesthetic strategies for depicting a queer/trans ontology of fugitivity can contribute to a critique of queer/trans representation in film and media studies. To this end, I present an interim report on my dissertation project, in which I analyze Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures and Andy Warhol’s film Batman Dracula, made in cooperation with Jack Smith. I aim to define what I call ‘vampiric qualities’ in these works and – following Jed Samer’s concept of “trans retrospectatorship” (Samer 2022, 176) – explore their implications for a resistant trans-aesthetic reading. While representational justice often serves the goal of inclusion, it struggles to bring about fundamental changes to structural conditions and even carries the risk of reinforcing violent structures and falling into the trap of neoliberal appropriation. Looking back on an earlier anti-assimilationist queer/trans imaginary, especially one that deliberately engaged with aspects of the mythical and the fantastical as a form of resistance (Lewis 2017, 61, 65), proves to be highly productive in this regard.
The aspects of the vampiric explored in Smith’s films unfold within the tension between fear and fascination that characterizes both the filmic medium (Metz 1985, 87–88) and the figure of the vampire, while simultaneously engaging with cinema’s own (un)dead condition. Smith subverts these media-aesthetic qualities through an artistic strategy of incompletion, in which film itself emerges as an undead body: perpetually in transition, never fully complete. By conceiving of film as performance and performance as film, he foregrounds processes of fluid (media) transition as the very subject of his work. This aesthetic practice opens up the possibility of a form of trans representation that resists the imperatives of visibility and legibility underpinning conventional notions of representational justice.
