ABSTRACT
This chapter splits into two parts. The first is an essay contributed to Photography/Politics: Two, published in Britain in 1986. The second, from How Do I Look?, written in 1989 and published in the United States, consists of a partial revision of my earlier views, which led me to reevaluate Mapplethorpe’s troublesome black male nudes. The splitting is not a repudiation of the Freudian concept of fetishism and its importance for the analysis of race and representation, so much as an inscription of major changes in the political and cultural context in which the reading and interpretation of Mapplethorpe’s work has become a key site of struggle and contestation. If anything, recent developments in black gay art practices and in the repressive cultural politics of Jesse Helms and the New Right renew the relevance of “fetishism” as a concept which enables examination of the political implications of the emotional ambivalence that arises at the intersection of the psychic and the social. Insofar as the splitting also circumscribes the position(s) from which I speak, as a black gay subject, the ambivalent “structures of feeling” I have tried to negotiate and describe in reading Mapplethorpe, speak to the lived relations of difference that characterize the complex and incomplete character of any social identity.
