Trans visibility and trans viability: a Roundtable

This Roundtable is crafted from the online event held on Saturday 20 November 2021 on Trans Visual Cultures. That event was organized to celebrate the recently published themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture on new work in transgender art and visual cultures, guest edited by Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg, and suggested for the journal by Jill H Casid. The themed issue emerged from a session run at the College Art Association in New York, 2018, programmed by Metzger and Ringelberg. For the event in November 2021, some of the contributors to the journal's themed issue (Kara Carmack, Sascha Crasnow, Stamatina Gregory, Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg) were joined by interlocutor Jill Casid, and respondent Jack Halberstam to share their thoughts on trans visual culture/s now, and to consider what it is to write trans visual culture, as well as to live in relation to transness. The event happened to fall on Transgender Day of Remembrance. Given the fraught or ambivalent feelings that many have about such a day, the event was also taken as an occasion to talk about ways of untethering trans visibility from what is lethal to trans viability. After the event, the organizers solicited a few additional reflections on concerns that emerged - in particular around matters of the visual, trans visibility, and lived experience. These are brought together to act as a refractive prism for what happens when we center thinking seriously with the implications and potentials of trans art and visual culture for trans hopes and fears, kinship and community, lives and loves. The publication of this Roundtable takes the themed issue as a crucial springboard for critical, transversal trans* imaginings of the variant worlds to be unfolded by undoing the lock of the gender binary and its settler colonial and white supremacist violences, and to further the demand that thinking with trans alters substantially the ways we approach the visual

Ways of seeing: 40th anniversary issue

The Journal of Visual Culture marks the 40th anniversary of John Berger’s 'Ways of Seeing', the 1972 BBC television mini-series and adapted book with a special issue edited by Raiford Guins, Juliette Kristensen, and Susan Pui San Lok. Berger's book, now part of the Penguin on Design series which includes Sontag’s 'On Photography' and McLuhan’s 'The Medium is the Message', has been a monumental influence on the fields of art history, cultural studies, design, visual communication, and, of course, visual culture studies. With an editorial by Guins, the issue includes contributions from Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Lisa Cartwright, Jill Casid, Laurie Beth Clark, Clive Dilnot, Jennifer Gonzalez, Martin Jay, Guy Julier, Louis Kaplan, Peter Lunenfeld, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Vanessa Schwartz, and Marita Sturken. It features an interview by Juliette Kristensen with the programmes’ and book’s producers Mike Dibb and Richard Hollis, as well as a photo essay by Susan pui san Lok, that draws on Dibb’s personal archive to highlight the televisual project’s collaborative production and material traces. As the Journal’s Events editor, Lok also commissioned five photo-essays that take up some of the book’s enduring themes: Julian Stallabrass continues the circuitous critique of looking, desiring, and selling, into the realm of subvertising; Sonia Boyce plays on the relay and duplication of eyes and lenses, rotating around and with their at least doubled subjects; Ming Wong shifts centres and perspectives, transposing the intermingled dreams of advertising and movie industries from 1950s Hollywood to 1950s Singapore, and so-called West to East; John Timberlake alludes to the politics and disavowal of climate change, hinting at pollutant incursions upon an urban picturesque; while Broomberg and Chanarin, in the face of saturated, mediatised and televised violence and death, implicate the viewer in ways of seeing and the politics of looking, then and now