Lecture: Jeanne Vaccaro (Virtual)

Out of Distracted Vision

Thinking at the intersection of diagnostic and aesthetic taxonomies, Out of distracted vision considers the artistic output of sexologist John Money and punk activist Chloe Dzubilo. Working in different moments, one an authority, the other an outsider, both make experimental doodles and invent neologisms—like transeuphoria, mindbrain, and fuckology—to mediate the monotony of the sciences of sex. Taken together, their visual artifacts illustrate the constraints of diagnosis and animate a psychedelic boredom in the administration of sex and gender.

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Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar-curator at the ONE Archives, and faculty in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University under the mentorship of José Muñoz. Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, considers the felt labor of making identity and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital | the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is also the recipient of the Alan Bérubé prize for outstanding LGBT public history awarded by the American Historical Association.

At ONE, Jeanne has organized public programs with Arthur Jafa and Tourmaline on speculative archives and Black futures and the symposium “What you don’t know about AIDS could fill a museum.” She recently curated Foucault on Acid, an exhibition of paintings by Indigenous artist Grace Rosario, staged with correspondence and photography documenting Foucault’s 1975 acid trip in Death Valley. The exhibition considers psychedelia, ecology, the university, precarious labor conditions, and anti-immigrant culture wars, inviting exploration of how archival and desert imaginaries coordinate spaces of unfreedom and possibility. In the spring, she is curating an exhibition at Human Resources Los Angeles with Xandra Ibarra, lay my burden down, that presents the archival collections of performance artists Bob Flanigan and Sheree Rose alongside Ibarra’s sculptural explorations of disability, race, and consent. Jeanne is also the recipient of a multi-year Getty Foundation grant to research and curate Scientia Sexualis, a survey of contemporary artists whose work engages histories of sexuality in the sciences and confronts and reimagines sex and gender as sites of experimentation, which will open at the ICA LA in 2024.

Jeanne is co-editor, with Joan Lubin, of a special issue of Social Text on the afterlives of American sexology, and she has published scholarly writing and art criticism in GLQ, Radical History Review, Trap Door, BOMB Magazine, among other venues. She was a Queer | Art curatorial fellow, and serves on the advisory board of NYC LGBT Center’s archive. With AJ Lewis she co-founded and co-organizes the New York City Trans Oral History Project, a community archive partnership with the New York Public Library.