Introduction: Visuality and Academia’s Identity Problem

The complexities of identity have always been a point of contention and divisiveness in visually based research, its discourses, and pedagogy, which is consistent with academia across the board. Despite the mounting cultural and ideological perception of its progressiveness—its encouragement of intellectual freedom and radical ideas, its activism, and its support of anti-imperialist scholarship—the profession has consistently been in conflict with the acceptance and support of a range of historically marginalized and often threatened constituencies.

Critical debates that destabilize fixed notions of identity have engendered new perspectives, particularly in work critiquing issues of essentialism, heterosexism, monolithic affiliation, and other culturally imposed limitations. Over the last several decades, vibrant intellectual conversations across the academy have inaugurated fluid and intersectional conceptions of the self and community, impacting both theory and practice, and radically shifting contemporary aesthetics. This collection seeks to magnify the questions of belongingness raised in contemporary art and generate an inclusive and interdisciplinary discussion that foregrounds visual practice as a crucial site of social and institutional commentary.

Since the last presidential election in 2024, the administration’s systematic attempts to dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies and curb liberalism in universities have engendered a great deal of anger, fear and anxiety in the broader academic community. In our current American political moment, a battle is being waged by the political Right on many fronts, one of which is a conflict over education at all levels. The dismantling of equity programs is mounting, while the federal government seeks to reverse strides to make American education more accessible.

Yet, within higher education, contradictions and complexities subtend this misleading conversation. Institutions of higher education tend to regard themselves as bastions of tolerance and as safe spaces for a range of vulnerable groups, treating bigotry as a threat that exists purely beyond the walls of the institution. This, of course, is a glaringly false rationalization and disavowal of the more complex challenges facing universities. As much as universities hesitate to acknowledge it, in higher education in the U.S., animus directed towards queer communities and ethnic and racialized minorities, including African American, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, and Muslim people, is not simply a social problem that exists exclusively beyond the institution. That is because sentiment—in the form of promotional pamphlets, solidarity stickers, DEI workshops, and all the impassioned speeches professing commitments to protecting the vulnerable—tends to be a pacifier and not a guarantee of altruism. These gestures do not always act on behalf of others; they do not inherently provide a shield from the biases of people or from institutional inaction that fails to protect the unsupported and those under attack. We also must acknowledge that antagonism between the vulnerable groups mentioned above, or even tensions existing within a particular community, impedes the ability of these constituencies to support each other or collectively address institutional inequity. Before we can make substantive progress against the external political threats we currently face, we will need a self-critical praxis that interrogates the institutions we labor in and the injuries we inflict on those around us.

This contradiction is evident in the ways academic institutions acknowledge the reality of their demographic disparities, while denying that bigotry and bias are capable of existing within those spaces. Inside Higher Ed referenced a 2024 study conducted by CUPA-HR that tracked representation, pay, and equity in higher education. The results found continued disparities for women and people of color in tenure-track faculty ranks. There are similar disparities in student admission and staff employment:

Despite the overall increases in representation for women and faculty of color over time, representation varies by faculty rank. Statistically, as rank increases from assistant to associate to full professor, the proportions of faculty of color and women decrease. In 2022–2023, 35% of assistant professors were faculty of color, and 53% were women. At the next rank of associate professor, which is generally the first promotion faculty receive along with tenure, the representation of faculty of color reduces to 26%, and the representation of women reduces to 47%. At the highest rank of full professor, people of color represent only 22% and women represent only 36% of faculty. This finding of diminished representation with each increase in faculty rank has been observed in each of the past seven years (Schneider and Bichsel 2024).

The disparities articulated in these findings are well known within the academy, and similar data can be found across a range of sources, yet these results clearly illustrate “that faculty of color and women continue to be better represented in the lowest-ranking and lowest-paying positions and are underrepresented at the highest-ranking and highest-paying positions” (Schneider and Bichsel 2024).

Despite the absurdity of the cultural debate, ethnic, racial, sexual, and gendered oppression is a persistent problem in the U.S. that is virulently present both within so-called liberal or Leftist institutional culture, as well as among conservatives and on the political and cultural Right. Each side castigates the other as the locus of discrimination and inequity, while the minoritized are jostled between them in a fight for survival. Put another way, conservatives persistently attempt to take away equity-based programs from the Left, which the minoritized rarely benefit from in the first place. Such is the partisan culture game perpetuated in this country, and this competition to determine the lived realities of the minoritized plays out continuously on university campuses across the United States.

The enduring struggles for reciprocity and acceptance experienced by underrecognized groups have spawned cynicism about academia in general and its stated ethical commitments. For some, the more loudly a university broadcasts its commitments to DEI, the more structurally inequitable that institution actually is (Ahmed 2012). This is not to suggest—which would be wildly inaccurate—that all academic institutions’ commitments to equity are inauthentic. But there is still an abiding sense that academia’s words are not in step with its actions, even despite the lingering hopefulness that transformation is always a possibility. Yet, under the surface lies a more pernicious set of concerns that make one skeptical of all the performative allyship and virtue signaling that pervades the current landscape of academic culture. Needless to say, there are many universities and educators who are deeply committed to an educational praxis grounded in equity and fairness. Without their presence, institutions of higher learning would be significantly less democratic, critically open, and broadly accessible. Despite the presence of such ethical earnestness, equity efforts that use identity to determine institutional access “continue to be the bête noire of the political Right”, even though their characterization of the liberal academy as a purveyor of unearned handouts is more myth than reality (Brest and Levine 2024).

Over the past five years, however, institutions of higher education have been derided for their participation in protests and activism against the extrajudicial murders of Black citizens, and, more recently, in response to Zionism and the Israeli–Palestinian war. Higher education’s commitments to rallying against a range of historical and present-day abuses—threats to democracy, colonialism, Western imperialism, slavery, settler colonialism, capitalist rapacity, neoliberalism, genocide and ethnic cleansing, racism, gender oppression, and anti-queerness, among other societal ills—has served to fuel the perception that academe has become dominated by an extremist brand of liberalism grounded in lowered standards and anti-American sentiment (among a menu of other ills). But these characterizations belie the historical and present-day reality that academic institutions have never truly been bastions of inclusion and equal opportunity, especially for racialized groups. The forms of moral outrage and activism in American universities that have engendered the ire of the political Right have not necessarily benefited the marginalized groups laboring within those institutions. Disciplines like African American studies, Africana studies, and Black studies have only been in existence since the late 1960s and, since their inception, have had to fight for institutional security and permanence. The conditions have been similar for women’s studies, gender studies, Asian-American, Native American (and now Indigenous studies), and Chicanx and Latinx studies. Even under liberalism, these disciplines and fields have consistently been on unstable ground. Out of these arenas, new critical discourses surfaced that were concerned with the relationship between identity and visuality.

During multiculturalism and the identity debates of the 1980s and 1990s, the emergence of identity-based art began to transform the visual arts by foregrounding a range of themes, from race and ethnicity to gender and sexuality. At this time, and despite institutional indignation, the concerns of identity found a place in visually based research across disciplines and fields in the academy. Moreover, visual representation, in general, became a fault line as mass media forms like cinema and television became viewed as the most effective means for the dissemination of not just consumerist influence but also propagandistic information and social engineering. The identity-oriented art practices of this period tended to challenge stereotypes, caricatures, and the reductive ideological framings of certain bodies across the spectrum of visual culture forms. Visuality, what Nicholas Mirzoeff characterized as “the intersection of power with visual representation”, therefore, became a contested arena of intense debate and esthetic intervention, particularly as it pertained to the hyper-visuality of everyday life, but arguably more importantly, the excessive representation of identity and difference (Mirzoeff 2002, p. 4). Feminist, queer, and ethnic minority artists and scholars were very much concerned with the conjunction between identity and visuality as they endeavored to resist the representational and critical regimes that relegated and reduced their identities to fixed and narrow categories.

Ultimately, visually based research, both within and outside the academy, has appeared to embrace culturally narrow framings of identity. In academia today—despite valiant efforts by the historically marginalized to construct an oppositional cultural production that denaturalizes popular constructions of identity—there is a clear shift towards the codifying of identity groups into prescribed roles, clichéd esthetic and conceptual categories, and often narrow critical framings, with their own separate histories and critical discourses. Even among these identity-based fields, there are antagonisms, hierarchies (which often mirror the racialized and gendered hierarchies in society), and efforts to position particular conversations as tangential and subservient to others.

Over the past five years, I have frequently written about the academy’s tendency to silo identity-specific discourses into their own discreet subfields, which separates them from the critical and historical master narratives of the established, institutionally dominant disciplines:

Art History suffers from a deeply problematic form of racial categorization that segregates creative histories and restricts scholars of color from engaging in research areas extending beyond those related (or at least perceived to relate) to their respective identities. Simply put, we are limited in the conversations we can engage in and the fields we discuss; therefore, there is a perception that our role in the academy is to teach in fields for which there is little institutional investment. For Black scholars in the arts, their institutional presence and purpose, not to mention the perception of their breadth of knowledge and expertise, are limited to a damaging set of ideological reductions (Murray 2022, p. 149).

This problematic tendency encourages intellectual and methodological (and identity-specific) essentialisms and gatekeeping, which are incommensurate with the values of intellectual and creative freedom that academic and arts institutions tout with regularity. The danger is that this tendency, particularly in education and scholarly pursuits, perpetuates an intellectual and identity-based form of isolationism that is non-antagonistic and operates quietly as standard scholarly and institutional practice. Its restrictions and reductions persist without much interrogation or disruption, since everyone feels more or less supported, in what art historian Eddie Chambers characterized as a “stay in your laneness” (Chambers 2020, p. 1.):

As someone who came into academia fairly late in my working life, I was struck by the fiendish entanglements and constraints that race played within university art history departments…

Looking around at the art history departments across the United States with which I had varying degrees of familiarity, I perceived that African American faculty were frequently, somewhat predictably, there to teach African American art. It was similarly apparent that African faculty were there to teach African art; Chinese academics taught Chinese art; and so on (Chambers 2020, p. 1).

The danger of these fixities of identity is that they can encourage performativity around a very crude and one-dimensional set of identity-based scripts. Within academia and the arts, this compartmentalization may unwittingly thrust the marginalized into a process of culturalization and consumptive spectacle. It also has the effect of discouraging the work of scholars who are committed to exploring the hybrid and intersectional nature of identity formation. Progressive institutions (and their related discourses) may ultimately function in a regulatory and disciplinary manner should they position identity-based groups into prescribed positionalities that are locked into cultural politics of exclusion, victimhood, and poetics of woundedness (Brown 1995).

The contributions to this volume address a range of subjects that challenge one-dimensional understandings of identity. Volume co-editor Stacy Schwartz examines the performance-based art of Danielle Abrams, which critically engages with debates on race, queerness, and identity. Schwartz argues that Abrams directly challenged monolithic and heteronormative structures of identity, unpacking how the artist explored the invisibility of Jewish people of color while taking on a range of intersecting themes from the state of Black/Jewish relations in the U.S., the complexities of her own Black and Jewish familial heritage, as well as her identity as a lesbian. Brett Ashley Kaplan similarly upsets fixed notions of identity in her exploration of the African American and Jewish singer/musician Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell’s creative production that rejects reductive racial and ethnic terminologies like “Black” and “Jew” to create a hybrid Blewish esthetic. Kaplan argues that Russell’s video works to disrupt problematic assumptions about identity, specifically related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnoreligious affiliation.

Kerri Steinberg focuses on embodied understandings of Jewish belongingness, history, and identity by considering two seemingly incompatible cultural examples: the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Israel and Bill Wurtzel’s Funny Food Art. Steinberg’s unconventional analysis shows how each, in its own way, makes us attentive to space, the haptic, and collective memory in relation to Jewish post-war identity. Lisa Bloom critically examines the relationship between Jewish identity and feminist art by surveying artworks by Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller. Engaging with Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory”, Bloom interrogates the scholarly hesitance in the visual arts to give critical attention to the complexities of Jewish identity.

Volume Editor Derek Conrad Murray interviews the Oakland, California-based multimedia artist Adia Millett, who is among a growing contingent of Black artists who have embraced abstraction in their creative production. The growing interest in form by contemporary African American artists is notable, considering their omission from the history of late-modernist American abstraction. While acknowledging how both societal and art world racism contributed to their exclusion, the interview also explores how the intracultural mandate that Black artists prioritize racial injustice as opposed to more esoteric and formalist aesthetics has often limited the creative imaginations of Black artists. In the interview, Millett addresses this legacy while discussing the influences that have shaped her creative journey. Amelia Jones unpacks how Enlightenment conceptions of individual autonomy and sovereign subjectivity constructed a notion of identity rooted in a European white male hegemony in the Euro-American context. The constructed centrality of the straight white male artist has, as Jones attests, been the focus of critique by a range of minoritized subjects. Jones foregrounds the work of a diverse group of contemporary artists who interrogate the falsity and continued centrality of this enduring archetype (and its capitalist and neoliberal investments) as the ideological ideal of creative authorship.

Visual studies scholar Soraya Murray considers how video games are theorized and discussed, as well as conventional pedagogical strategies, with an emphasis on strategies for interrupting identity-mapped notions of expertise. Pointing out the ways that belongingness may collapse into prescribed roles, Murray emphasizes the importance of constantly striving to open up methodologies and pedagogies. By interrupting the social imaginary around representation in video games specifically and computational culture more generally, educators and designers can intervene in the overdetermined masculinist culture of technology and innovation. Similarly, considering how positionality inflects notions of expertise, Lauren A. McQuistion disrupts the myth of the tragic artist surrounding Eva Hesse by reframing her life and work as a process-oriented painter engaged with ongoing formal considerations like those of her male peers Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner. Reinterpreting her work by engaging deeply with her own prolific and detailed writing, McQuistion reveals the ways that her artistic and intellectual pursuits have been overshadowed by a tendency to psychologize her, rather than observe her commitment to material investigations of form. In his innovative interpretive approach to analyzing works by the artists Annette Cords, G Farrell Kellum, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Gregory Blair investigates how identity formation in these artists’ works explores how the collective is manifested in their singular identities. For Blair, the contemporary moment unsettles legibility and therefore denies the fixities that are so often prescribed to identity. The often-chaotic interaction between the singular and the collective in their artworks highlights how the implicit instability of identity is expressed formally as a visual palimpsest.

Finally, scholars Alpesh Kantilal Patel and Ace Lehner both make significant interventions into the evolving discourse concerning trans identities. Patel takes on the absence of critical engagement with pedagogy within the history of art. While considering the interrelation between a scholar’s pedagogy and their research, Patel reflects on a course he taught in the fall of 2022 called “Transgender Studies meets Art History”. Utilizing the personal as a critical strategy, Patel’s vital investigation considers how transgender studies can open up new ways of approaching pedagogy, visual art, and curation while also considering how “trans”, as an identity and a concept, impacted both his teaching and research. Lehner argues that there is a need for trans-visual culture to be understood outside of conventional Western conceptions of identity and visuality, that trans deploys a new understanding of bodies, identity, representation, and visual culture. Utilizing the work of trans masculine artist and photographer Wynne Neilly as a key exemplar, Lehner explores how their work engages in a transformative praxis that brings needed complexity to the dominant understanding of identity and representation while unseating the import of White masculinity as the center of Western art and visual culture in an increasingly anti-trans political climate.

This volume represents a significant departure from the ways identity is positioned in the discourse of art and visual culture, reframing it towards a collectivity and mutuality rooted in a liberal humanist ethos. The aim is also to contemplate the troubled relationship between politics, culture, academia, identity, and visuality. The institutionally dominant discourses concerned with art and visuality, in general, tend to mirror the dynamics of universities, as well as academe’s often segregated approach to the production of knowledge and creative expression. It resists the enclosures that encourage scholars and artists to rigidly embrace the limits of collective identity and, therefore, their engagements with identity are often restricted and positioned in relative intellectual, critical, and creative isolation. This tendency highlights the failures of academia to support not just the institutional stability and intellectual freedom of various groups but also their humanity, dignity, and complexity as members of what is actually a diverse community of cultural producers. Unexpected connections are to be found among many of these essays, and unlikely intellectual affinities and insights. This project implicitly acknowledges the challenges faced by the underrecognized while rejecting the conceit that the intolerances they face are so distinct that they must be separated and codified as irrevocably in contradistinction to each other. In short, we must begin to think about identity differently and embrace our connectedness in struggle.