work produced over the course
of the last ten years, visually remaps the
political and theoretical
cutting edge of the queer avantgarde. Throughout
this beautiful and moving
collection, LaGrace Volcano returns to the
materiality of the body in
order to trouble the conventional in a forceful
challenge to both biological
essentialism and theories of transgression.
LaGrace Volcano’s work represents a timely and
much needed intervention
in a number of ongoing
debates within queer academic, artistic, and activist
communities. Answering the
call not only to examine various manifestations
of lesbian masculinity but
also to complicate readings of femininity, in
‚The Feminine
Principle’ LaGrace Volcano exposes the contours of queer
femininities. His
photographic mediation on the feminine documents a history
of queer femininity through
portraits of Susie Bright and Kate Bornstein, as
well as the ‚Femme Next
Door’. In ‚Lesbian
Boyz and Other Inverts,’ LaGrace
Volcano subsequently turns to
demonstrate the myriad ways in which
masculinity can in fact be
subversive, as he celebrates the bodies of butch
dykes, transsexual boys and
other gender queers. Then, in a
series of
images and interviews LaGrace
Volcano titles ‚Ars Poetica’, he returns to
the feminist pornography
debates and to unanswered questions raised by the
lesbian sex wars of the
1980’s in order to complicate feminist concerns with
erotica, obscenity, and
perhaps most importantly with the transgressive
pleasures of pornography
itself. Finally, LaGrace Volcano focuses on the
transmogrified body as he
explodes heteronormative and essentialist
interpretations of the
physical self with images of hermaphrodykes, trans
men and what he calls
‚transgenital landscapes.’
These photographs of
gender variant bodies
simultaneously underscore both the social construction
and lived embodiment of trans
masculinity.
In his introduction to Sublime Mutations, transgender
theorist Jay
Prosser remarks that through
LaGrace Volcano’s work ‚we see the changing
shape of our bodies and our
communities reflected’ (11).
Importantly
however, we also glimpse the
changes promised by our was of seeing, the
mutations we read as well as
those that are visited upon our bodies.
LaGrace Volcano skillfully
demonstrates that sublime mutations are always
already the transformations
that viewers project on the physical world, and
especially on the body.
LaGrace Volcano’s most recent photographs
examine the ways in which
inter-gendered and intersexed
subjectivity allow us to envisage the body
anew. Yet his work implodes binary imaginings
not only by emphasizing the
differences of transgendered
or intersexed bodies, but by queering the
normal body as well. Crucially though, the bodies he
photographs are not
objects held at a distance
but rather are celebrated, as Lagrace Volcano
aptly puts, as ‚sites
of mutation, loss, and longing.’
Documentation of the
loss of his friend, writer
Kathy Acker to cancer, and the transformation of
his lover Simo
Maronati’s abled body into a disabled one, expands the
category of queerness to
include bodies that are not necessarily
homosexually marked but are
nevertheless queerly positioned in relation to
the normative. In the end, he always innovatively
complicates the
relationship between subject
and object as LaGrace Volcano makes visible the
ways in which he himself is
deeply implicated in the project of chronicling
the meanings of queer bodies
and communities, both as a transgendered
intersexed person and as an
artist and activist.