latent [adjective] (of a quality or state) existing but not yet developed or manifest; hidden or concealed. From the Latin latent – ‘being hidden’, from the verb latere.

Laura Guy reads a few lines from Zoe Leonard’s 1992 poem, I want a president.[1] It is a beautiful verse that demands an almost inconceivable future, power to the powerless, the Presidency of the United States assumed by an oppressed minority – like someone with AIDS or poor or gay, those at the receiving end of the violence of the state. It is a demand for the cultures, knowledges and histories of the maligned and marginalised. It is a desire to speak to a future; or perhaps a desire to speak to a future always already existing in the present and past lives of the protagonists of Leonard’s manifesto.

Since reflecting on Laura’s response and the broader discussion that took place to mark the launch of a special issue of the journal Third Text on social reproduction and a book, Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice, I have been thinking about ‘latency’, specifically latency within feminist and queer politics.[2]  When I speak of ‘latent’ in this context, I want to emphasise it meaning something always already existing (but hidden) and something as yet to be realised. To think of this less in the abstract, for example, we can perhaps consider social reproduction and its concern with certain labour practices (for example sex work) ‘hidden’ under capital as inherently latent.

To help in an understanding of latency and social reproduction, it is perhaps useful to invoke the image of a ‘double movement’ that is performed. Important here to stress the use of the word movement, suggesting being in transit, going from one place to another, an in-between state if you will. [3] This may look something like a movement towards understandings of our own lived experiences and away to the broader socio-political and economics forces that act on us. Or a movement towards understandings of our own lived experiences and away to others’ lived experiences and how the broader socio-political and economics forces act on them. Or a movement towards seizing control of the socio-political and economic forces and away from said forces to different socio-political and economic arrangements. These movements are not necessarily linear or progressive, instead oscillate constantly back and forth and could even be broken apart further from these simple illustrative binaries, but hopefully help us recognise the latent qualities in such deconstructive thought i.e. what is already there (what is hidden) and what has yet to be realised.

I would like to suggest this movement, and specifically the simultaneity of a “towards and away”, helps describe what happens in feminist and queer enquiry and practice, as Horne and Perry outline in their introduction to Feminism and Art History Now, “that the work of feminist art historians is to continually seek out the overlooked moments and spaces within the dominant narrative that structures cultural production and consumption, and [my emphasis] to contest the concepts that exert authority over the discipline at any given time.”[4] Perhaps art can be latent, in performing a temporal sleight of hand it can recite and relocate histories of activism and struggle, it can hold all the potentialities of a new/old politics in a future-present. [5] Art and art history produces or reproduces culture and knowledge; certain feminist approaches to cultures and knowledges disrupts hegemonies and disciplinary borders and boundaries. In the makingof feminist and queer art and art histories, in the reading group, in the writing of books and journal articles, in artistic and curatorial practice and objects, in the way we live our lives, in working in affinity with others, we can perhaps (or already do) prefigure the ‘world’ in which we want to live.[6]

My experience of the launch event, and the Social Reproduction Reading Group, is one of double movements, towards and away. For almost three years, we have shared different feminist and queer texts, films and other documents that orbit the groups’ shifting understanding of ‘social reproduction’, navigating and moving in our own understandings and politics. In the reading and discussing of forces that act violently on bodies and their struggle, one has a continuous oscillation between the micro and macro; a revealing of the flows of power, from privileged reader/spectator to object/subject of enquiry.[7] I want a dyke for president and a fag for vice-president as much as I want a dissolution of this and all institutions. I want to form alliances and allegiances as much as I want to declare our abled, classed, gendered, racialised and sexed differences. I want this discursive exercise to curtail and collapse into a hot revolutionary mess.[8] A continual set of double movements, towards and away from identities and power.[9][10]

[1] Leonard’s poem starts “I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukaemia.” The most recent incarnation was installed on the High Line in New York City, ahead of the 2016 US Presidential Elections (the original was distributed in advance of the 1992 Elections), you can find out more here: http://art.thehighline.org/project/zoe-leonard/.

[2] The Social Reproduction of Feminist Art History event on 25 October 2017, included contributions and responses from Angela Dimitrakaki, Laura Guy, Victoria Horne, Kirsten Lloyd, Lara Perry, Catherine Spencer, Jenny Temple; facilitated by Frances Stacey, and co-hosted by Collective and the Global Contemporary Research Group, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. The event marked the launch of Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice edited by Victoria Horne and Lara Perry; and a special issue of Third Text on Social Reproduction and Art edited by Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd. Kirsten and Victoria co-founded the Social Reproduction Reading Group in 2015, which I have attended since inception.

[3] I think this reflection inclines towards an understanding of latency and a double movement as perhaps operational parts of a ‘becoming’, as outlined by Claire Parnet and Giles Deleuze, “Becomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits.”, in Dialogues II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. p. 2.

[4] Horne, Victoria, and Lara Perry, eds. Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice. London New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017. p. 9

[5] I’m thinking here, for example, of Sharon Hayes’ recent work, In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You, 2016 – you can find out more here: http://www.studiovoltaire.org/exhibitions/archive/sharon-hayes/

[6] A cautionary note against such prophetic statements, highlighted by Angela in the discussion at the launch event, about the need to go beyond the classed and privileged space of the academy and art institution, and work in-common and in-difference, in-struggle with oppressed groups. I think this is why I am musing on the term ‘latent’ in this reflection, as it feels it also captures the always already existing but as yet to be realised components of a politics of social reproduction.

[7] Micro and macro can be understood as one of the many binaries that shape our world, for example,  following Eve Sedgwick, the micro as the lived-experience of the minority individual (the “minoritizing view”) and its interplay with the macro, the majority of society (the “universalizing view”). Sedgwick applies this to understandings of modern homo and heterosexuality definition from the late nineteenth century in Epistemology of the Closet. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

[8] I want to think here for a moment, in the footnotes, of sex and sexuality, and the importance of queer perspectives (which Marina Vishmidt talks of her article, cited in footnote 9) in understandings of social reproduction, or more generally the political potentials in acts. I’m drawn to in this instance Samuel R. Delany and his understandings of the interplay of power, desire and sex: “Power. Power is what distinguishes the psychic discourse of desire from the social rhetoric of sex. The rhetoric of sex commands enough to make a man or a woman walk the streets of the city for hours, to drive alone or in groups, searching for a proper gap in the communicative wall through which desire may somehow show. But desire, to the extent that it is a material and social discourse, commands power enough to found and destroy cities, to reform the very shape of the city itself, laying down new avenues and restructuring whole neighbourhoods within it. And desire – paradoxically – is what holds erect that barrier to sex that so much of our rhetoric, as well as our actions which finally rhetoric is a part, breaks against and crumbles.”, Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. p. 20.

[9] Marina Vishmidt’s contribution to the Third Text special edition on Social Reproduction articulates a lucid understanding of social reproduction, and in doing so acknowledges the importance of a “double dynamic of strategic affirmation and refusal of identity endemic to all movements of the oppressed”, in ‘The Two Reproductions in (Feminist) Art and Theory since the 1970s’. Third Text 31, no. 1 (2 January 2017): p. 51. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2017.1364331.

[10] Someone mentioned at the launch event that ‘power’ hadn’t been mentioned; perhaps not in name but surely it is at least implicit, if not explicit, in a discussion of the reproduction of the labour force under capital? Perhaps thinking directly about the abstract nature of power, following thinkers such as Foucault, distracts from the already shifting (abstract) target of capitalism that is of primary concern to material feminists.