Catherine Opie: American Photographer, American Pervert

Abstract

In this brief essay, I review Catherine Opie's midcareer retrospective at the Guggenheim focusing on 3 of her self-portraits that elaborate on her leatherdyke identity. Interpreting these works through the scholarship of Ann Cvetkovich and the literature of Dorothy Allison, I read the progression from Self-Portrait/Cutting to Self-Portrait/Pervert to Self-Portrait/Nursing as a photographic argument regarding how sexuality can be generatively constituted through traumatic experience.

Notes

¹In sadomasochism historiography, the Catacombs was the first club where gay sadomasochists gathered for sexual play (Rubin, 1991).

²On racial trauma see also Scott (2010).

³My thinking in this section is heavily influenced by Cvetkovich's (2003) An Archive of Feelings and her proposition that trauma requires unusual archives.

⁴These connections are tentatively addressed in a photo-text piece entitled “Violence: It's a Personal Thing,” where she alluded to familial violence against children (Opie, as cited in Blessing, 2008).

⁵While these ideas explore how traumatic experience becomes recruited into eroticism and sexual pleasure, they should not be read as implying a general theory of sexual constitution. Human sexuality, especially in its non-normative variants, is complexly sutured and idiosyncratically assembled (Harris, 2005) and, as such, not by any means exclusively mediated through trauma.

⁶I purposefully retain this term, with the awareness that it is often conflated with pathology and the use of which has been rightly challenged (see Dimen, 2003, for a critique from a psychoanalytic perspective; Califia, 2002, from a sex positive perspective; Rubin, 1984, for an anthropological angle). I insist on its use, however, not so much for its resignification value (e.g., Brame, Brame, & Jacobs, 1993) but because I believe that sanitized versions of the term compromise how it is the very transgressiveness of the perverse act that helps build traction toward the psychic labor that perversion makes possible. Space limitations do not permit me to go further into this idea here.

⁷For notable exceptions see psychoanalytic writers Dimen (2001, 2003), Strenger (2002), and Weille (2002) and queer theorists Halperin (1995), Piontek (2006), and Thurer (2005).

“Catherine Opie: American Photographer” was a midcareer retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 26, 2008–January 7, 2009. For the images mentioned, the reader may consult the online exhibition: http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/opie/exhibition.html.