Global Queer and Feminist Visual Activism

Special Issue
In the current context of gender backlash, forms of queer and feminist activism are increasingly important, and so too is the scholarship that engages with them. Queer and feminist visual activism has varied origins in different global contexts and has emerged in a fluid cultural field of visual arts, popular culture, and protest aesthetics. This special issue is interested in queer and feminist expression through images and their context of production, mediation and re-mediation. Across 12 articles we explore the aesthetics and performativity of visual activism, and the opportunities it affords social justice actors, with the aim to expand on existing scholarship both geographically and conceptually. The history of global feminist and queer activism has too often been dominated by Western perspectives. This special issue seeks to foreground activism from across the globe, to reflect the international perspectives and agendas increasingly central to contemporary queer and feminist activism. The articles address work from South Africa, China, Brazil, Lebanon, Cote d’Ivoire, the UK, and the United States. They engage with a range of diverse topics including trans Instagrammers, feminist fibre art, queer Roma self-representation, learning disability amateur filmmaking, and sexual violence in the museum. Taking the notion of social practice as an integral part of the ‘process’ of visual activism, we identify three emerging themes across the articles in this special issue: refusal, care and thriving.