The Right to Look

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“…The First and Third Musicians speak for Christ, the heron, Judas, and Lazarus, creating for them a countervisual claim to autonomy which refuses segregation and categorization, and which claims the right to existence. 105 The Second Musician, however, seems to represent the world which defines itself only by excluding others, like heteronormativity and patriarchy. Thus, the function of this repetitive phrase is to exclude the solitary white heron, the birds, Judas, and Lazarus from the realm of normalcy, here represented by the invisible Father figure.…”

“…The repeated phrase represents the visuality of authority which separates, segregates, classifies whom it visualizes, counters desire, and refuses all emancipatory efforts. 106 When Lazarus and then Judas appear in the play, both terrify the crowds and represent the appearance of strangeness which has no place in the normative narrative-and the crowd turns and flees from this strangeness. In his notes to Calvary, Yeats also connects the solitary, contemplative birds to the subjective age which includes the individual, as opposed to the objective one which oppresses and excludes them: "such lonely birds as the heron, hawk, eagle, and swan, are the natural symbols of subjectivity, especially when floating upon the wind alone or alighting upon some pool or river" (VPL 789).…”

Yeats's Queer Dramaturgies: Oscar Wilde, Narcissus, and Melancholy Masculinities in Calvary

“…79 Wilde built on Carlyle's ideas on the hero, but only to challenge them by posing as an effeminate hero which "created a clear sense of gender and sexual difference. " 80 As Mirzoeff explains, this was a countervisual claim to autonomy, staged against Carlyle's reality: "If his being Irish could not be posed as Heroic aristocracy because of his perceived embodied difference, Wilde repositioned it as a form of Heroic resistance to tyranny that nonetheless endorsed the continuance of a decentralized British empire. " 81 For Mirzoeff, this countervisual claim is always performative, always goes against the masculine authority of visuality, and represents trans, queer, and feminist projects: it "is the means by which one tries to make sense of the unreality created by the visuality of authority while at the same time proposing a real alternative. "…”

“…This is similar to the example Mirzoeff uses in his book about Sojourner Truth, who presented herself as a hero of the US abolitionist movement that also "challenged the gendering of heroism as inevitably masculine. " 83 Yeats also recalls that Wilde created a counter-hero of himself through his performance of effeminacy as authority: "I had met a man who had found him in a barber's shop in Venice, and heard him explain, 'I am having my hair curled that I may resemble Nero'" (Au 285-86).…”

Review Essay: Art History in Its Image War. Ten recent publications on image-politics in relation to the possibility of art historical analysis

“…This is unfortunate given the apparent urgency of such a counterhistory in asserting the right to look 'in this moment of paradoxical emergency for authoritarian visuality'. 3 Questions of image war and spectacle have proliferated since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington D.C., with several art historians and cultural critics concerning themselves with the broader political use and abuse of images in the Global War on Terror and in recent, widespread civil unrest, especially uprisings, riots, strikes and occupations following the 2008 financial collapse. Language and picture making are seen as embroiled within image war, suggesting perhaps that the weapons of criticism are bent back upon themselves.…”