Laura Wexler
Yale University
Laura Wexler is Professor of American Studies, of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, of Film & Media Studies, Co-Chair of the Public Humanities Program, and Director of the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. She is author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism (UNC 2000), Pregnant Pictures (Routledge 2000), and Candy/A Good and Spacious Land (Yale 2017), a pair of books and an exhibition that are the culmination of a four-year-long project documenting New Haven’s dreams in its built environment, along with Magnum photographers Donovan Wylie and Jim Goldberg, and co-writer Christopher Klattel.
The Civil War has long been recognized as having consequences for representation—in its relationship to the emergence of photographic technologies, its connection to longstanding literary depictions of masculinity, and its... [ view full abstract ]
The Civil War has long been recognized as having consequences for representation—in its relationship to the emergence of photographic technologies, its connection to longstanding literary depictions of masculinity, and its effect on soldiers struggling to articulate their experiences. Studies of the Civil War have also addressed foundational political questions of race and gender. This panel looks at representations of gender and race alongside the crucial addition of sexuality. The striking chronological coincidence of the emergence and consolidation of modern sexuality (frequently located in the 1860s) and the Civil War (1861-65) has seldom been examined in a sustained way. The papers focus on masculinity in the Civil War era, across a range of photographic, literary and archival sources, and explore the shapes masculinity took in the Civil War era, developed in modes including the public opportunities of photography in an era of Black military service, the homoerotic possibilities of wartime experience recounted in fiction and nonfictional sources, and the devastating yet reconstructive contours of medical photography. The Civil War forms a link between these modes of representation, not only in shoring up their national consolidation of gender, racial, and sexual identities, but also in fracturing it. Cultural inquiry often relies on a notion of climate—race, gender, sexuality are “in the atmosphere” together at a given time and place—and strives, as this panel will do, to materialize those connections, which remain radically relevant in today’s cultural climate.
At the start of the Civil War, according to Wexler in "Frederick Douglass, Photography and a More Perfect Image," just 22 years after Daguerre’s invention, Frederick Douglass gave a talk in Boston about photography entitled “Pictures and Progress.” This talk, and his repeated returns to the topic, reveal him as one of the earliest and most astute theorists of photography in the United States. He believed that the camera was a visionary tool, offering an important avenue for social justice in a nation clamoring for change. He also held a deep nineteenth-century faith in technological progress. But not only did he write about photography, he became the most photographed public figure of the American nineteenth century. Wexler will ask if his great interest in crafting an image of himself as a representative man during the Civil War era also exposes underlying uncertainties about the atmosphere of progress that photography signified, despite his claims to the contrary, and especially during the concurrent development of degrading uses of the camera in the context of eugenics. Ironically, it may be Douglass’s unspoken but performative apprehension alongside his positive faith that continue to make his theorization of photography so important in the era of Black Lives Matter.
