Topicality is a mode of constraining abstraction to a modus operandi viewable and knowable by the State and heteronormative society at large. That results in violent surveillance of Queer life. While we understand that y’all want to debate and in some cases, opacity has helped, you do not get to choose that for us.

--ideally, the 1AC would be defending some form of abstraction for this card to really apply, but that shouldn’t be an issue given how I understand the thesis of the AFF.

Getsy ‘19 [David J. Getsy, art historian, curator, and art writer focusing on modern and contemporary art; 2019; “TEN QUEER THESES ON ABSTRACTION”; in Jared Ledesma, ed., Queer Abstraction, Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 2019); online version available at: ; accessed 07-13-2024] dliang

2. Abstraction’s queer appeal, for some, is that it models a resistance to the daily experience of surveillance and scrutiny. Both the long history of structural homophobia and the “politics of visibility” that characterized insurgent history of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer social movements have privileged recognizability.6 Whether to surveil, to attack, to uphold, or to connect, the pressure to make oneself visible as not-normal has been, itself, the norm. Visibility is politically urgent, there is no doubt. But, as Michel Foucault once remarked, “Visibility is a trap.”7 LGB history has organized itself around metaphors for becoming visible, such as “coming out.” This was characterized as both a matter of personal liberation and as a demand for demographic recognition. While such metaphors for becoming visible have been important politically and personally to many, we have to remember that the imperative to make oneself seen is different than loving one’s own queer life. The “come out” visual imperative is not equally effective, available, safe, pleasurable, or political for all—especially for subjects living at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities or for those living in contexts different from the United States, Western Europe, and their urban centers.8 Some would cast tactics of opacity and camouflage as self-denial, self-loathing, or fear. Such a chauvinist disregard for other contexts, for the complexities of other lives, and for the insurgency of these tactics is merely another imposition of normativity, albeit swathed in rainbow. Disclosure cannot be compulsory, for the politics of visibility also benefit protocols of surveillance. However much the politics of visibility are, have been, and will be a necessary tool in LGBT social and political movements, it must not be assumed to be the only way.9 Infiltration, camouflage, and opacity must be embraced. It is a matter of survival, of thriving, and of resistance to have at one’s disposal tactics of dissemblance, duplicity, masking, camouflage, and code-switching. The experience of being told one is outside the normal produces an activated relationship to resemblance, to recognizability, and to visibility. Consequently, queer practices of “looking like” are endemic and sophisticated. It is for these reasons that abstraction has proven an appealing language for some queer messaging. Abstraction, as a mode of visual poiesis, both conjures new visualizations and rebuffs viewers’ impulses to recognize and categorize. Glenn Ligon once said about his text paintings that dissolve into abstractions, “The movement of language toward abstraction is a consistent theme in my work. I’m interested in what happens when a text is difficult to read or frustrates legibility—what that says about our ability to think about each other, know each other, process each other.”10 One reason to face abstraction is because it can avoid, circumvent, or delay the visual consumption of the immediately recognizable or readily legible. In figurative art, whenever a human body is represented, we rush to classify it—and taxonomies of race, age, ability, gender, class, and appeal are all brought to bear on that image of a person. This is, of course, part and parcel of how people deal with each other daily. They read clues from fashion, from their kinesic relationality to us, from their evaluation of theirs and others’ bodily capacities, and from comparisons to (inevitably flawed) stereotypes of ill-defined groupings such as racial types and forced dimorphisms. For queer folks, such scrutiny is an agonistic daily experience, and many grew up having to conceal or camouflage their mannerisms, their furtive looks, their comportments, and themselves in order to blend into the presumed normal. (Such crushing scrutiny is compounded a hundred-fold for trans subjects who must always navigate others’ relentless attempts to read their body as evidence of the past instead of seeing them fully as a person in the present.) Abstraction can be one means to resist the cultural marking of the human body.11 This is a mode of defense, to be sure, but it is also fueled by an embrace of openness and the not-yet-known. Speaking of the extreme abstraction of the monochrome, Derek Jarman called it “an alchemy, effective liberation from personality. It articulates silence. It is a fragment of an immense work without limit.”12 Or, as Harmony Hammond has said of her works, “In their refusal to be any one thing at the same time they are themselves, the paintings can be seen to occupy some sort of fugitive or queer space and in doing so, remain oppositional.”13