Expanded Sexual and Gender Identities in Contemporary Photography

“Expanded Sexual and Gender Identities in Contemporary Photography” begins with the radical potential of the term ‘queer,’ as it was articulated in the 1990s. Considering the evacuation of this charge as it has come into everyday usage, which has occurred alongside shifts in what we understand to constitute the photographic image, this chapter asks ‘what's queer about queer photography now?’ This question is explored across four sections, and in relation to an international selection of contemporary work dealing with questions of translation, archiving, the complex condition of visibility, and photography's materiality. By way of answering the question ‘what's queer about queer photography now?’, the chapter interrogates the term ‘queer’ itself, looking to a range of practitioners from around the world, whose work emphasizes the still disruptive potential of using photography to visualize expanded sexual and gender identities.