Sophia-dmd2019

Cathy Hannabach (2016) Bodies on Display: Queer Biopolitics in Popular Culture, Journal of Homosexuality,63:3, 349-368, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2016.1124691

“As forms of popular culture, these works offer intriguing opportunities to trace how queer bioethics might emerge in nonclinical sites, including spaces of public pedagogy such as art and museum culture.”

Cameron's photography shows how the issues of queer bioethics come up not only in clinical sites but also in public art and museum spaces. His work was first shown as part of a 1994 exhibit in San Francisco.The LGBTQ+ community has been the most supportive of the artist's photography. Highlighting the work in their community centers and print media. The nude figures' poses in the artist's photography are often portray moments of action and performance. Cameron's photos were intended to remove the clinical view of transsexual bodies and redefine them as not in need of a cure.

“Loren Cameron debuted his photography as part of a 1994 San Francisco exhibit, followed by the publication of his 1996 book Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits.”

“Cameron’s photographs are most often exhibited in small university venues or LGBT community centers. Cameron’s photographs receive their widest distribution through print media, most notably queer and transgender studies books, academic journal articles, magazine articles, postcards, and publicity materials for LGBT organizations.”

“Both Cameron’s Self Nude and von Hagens’s Skinned Man depict nude male bodies poised between action and display.”

“The remote shutter release has become Cameron’s instrument of self-flaying, one lacking the physical sharpness of a blade but that nonetheless strips his body by pinning this naked body to photographic film. Cameron’s grip on the remote shutter release suggests a touch that can both strip and present his body to spectators, who are invited into such tactility through their looking practices. Cameron’s body faces the viewer, his torso and legs open to the camera as his head is turned away from us, perhaps toward an unseen object of attention. He steps to the side, weight resting on one hip in what feminists such as Iris Marion Young (2005Young, I. M. (2005). On female body experience: “Throwing like a girl” and other essays. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.[Crossref], , [Google Scholar]) have described as an unbalanced and rather vulnerable comportment. Such bodily openness leaves viewers with an unobstructed and invited look at his corporeality, and the flourish of his hand deliberately makes his naked body into an object of visual display.”

The pose which Cameron displays with weight resting on one hip

“The authority with which Cameron grips the shutter release suggests command over the photograph and the spectator’s gaze. Here Cameron’s body—a trans body that has historically been only an object of medicine’s visual culture—asserts the right to look at himself and to structure how he is looked at by others. In claiming and making visible the photographic apparatus, Cameron attempts to wrestle control of the photographic gaze from legal, medical, and cultural institutions whose predatory gaze has historically constructed trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming bodies as pathological problems in need of medical cure.”

“Loren Cameron’s Self Nude mocks such rhetorics, creatively reworking signifiers characteristic of medicine’s visual culture. Cameron’s Self Nude mobilizes shame, pleasure, and rage to critique anatomy’s visual culture, specifically 19th-century medical photography.”