Unraveling Complexities
University of Texas at Austin
The Two-faced Sex Worker: A Critical Analysis of the Photographic Language of Sex Worker Self-portraits in Online Spaces View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Camille Waring
The face is the most rudimentary code of a photographic self-portrait. However, for the woman sex worker, showing one’s face in a portrait is a complex, nuanced choice and, at times, a dangerous practice with devastating consequences; however, a visual practice that is crucial to understanding sex worker identity construction and the language of sex work. A sex worker concealing her face is a critical feminist anonymity practice that intersects visibility and surveillance. The resultant impact on the visual culture of sex work inevitably shapes the language of sex work. This paper introduces the aesthetic terms ‘face out’ and ‘face in’ to describe the previously undocumented language of portraiture unique to women sex workers. Thus, this study provides an original analysis drawing upon theories of the face in historical and contemporary art, the morality and political significance of the face and the self-presentation and representation of women. The methodology employed is an interdisciplinary approach of arts-based and ethnographic research strategies. Drawing on photographic and qualitative research data collected from 450 sex workers. Crucially in rejecting the creation of photographs as part of art-based research, this method does not bring the photograph into existing sex work theories but starts with the self-portrait, allowing for a new understanding of the visual language of sex work. This work contributes to image and society discourses by introducing and defining previously undefined visual and linguistic practices unique to the visual culture of contemporary women sex workers who sell sex in online spaces.
Featured Doubling Back: A Hybrid Reality Guided with Queerness View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Margaret Chambers
With this paper, I argue for the immediate dismissal of frameworks positioning virtual space as other than “real”. Using this shift in orientation as a crucial starting point, I posit that the virtual is not, and should not be, a space of fiction, nor a secondary locale, but rather a proliferating lifeline to the physical. The virtual contains power to expand; shapeshift; liberate. It allows for a doubling queerness that finds its breath in the vibrating pixels of a screen. How then, considering the ethical complexities of virtual counterparts, in the face of late-stage capitalism, surging white supremacist ideals, and violent regression of rights for queer and female-identifying bodies, do we take care to sustain the imaginative and life-affirming potentials these spaces allow for? Combining sculpture, formal analysis, psychoanalysis, and contemporary feminist theory, I utilize the lens of my own “invisible”, queer identification to advocate for the power in viewing the physical and the digital as tender counterparts. As I work to locate my body between these shifting and overlapping spaces, I find potency in challenging expectations for what the physical and digital are prepared to hold together: surrogacy and mediation being key to my thinking. I track progression of these ideas, mining sculptural materials, endurance-driven processes, and theoretical technologies which comprise my studio practice and exploring contemporary technologies of queer pleasures through material proxy and virtual allowances. Out of this comes offerings of alternative orientation; a possibility that the future of virtual spaces might contain the physical, the “actual”.
