Do Both. Abstraction’s refusal of normative perspectives is not limited, but generative, and the frame we begin from is a prerequisite to effective critique.

6. Abstraction as a mode of resistance to visibility is not limited to queer perspectives. Intersectional accounts of abstraction and visibility are necessary and expansive. There have been artists working from many different marginalized positions who have used abstraction as a mode of resistance to visibility, scrutiny, and surveillance or who have utilized it as a means of worlding, of poiesis, or of futurity. These are articulated in response to the daily experience of others’ categorizing gazes and to the persistent cultural marking that any representation of the human form calls forth from viewers. Such employments of abstraction gain their political and affective resonances because they are drawn from the anger, exhaustion, and facility that come with navigating the ways in which “marked” positions of difference are opposed to (and defining of) a supposedly unmarked “neutral.” Of course, any unmarked position only gains its contours by policing boundaries of difference, and power is dispensed across these borders between the “normal” and the “other.” We know well these unmarked positions that attempt to mask themselves as somehow natural; among the most insidious are Whiteness, heteronormativity, ability, and the doctrine that genders are binary and static. Abstraction’s resistant capacity can be used against this hegemonic positing of the invisibility of normativity and the visibility of difference. In thinking about the wide range of deployments of non-representation and afiguration, it is the power-laden relationship to visibility that is the key variable. For instance, there are long and complex histories of Black artists who have used abstraction in relation to the virulent force of racism, whether to call out its workings or to circumvent the speed with which race becomes a primary factor in the visual categorization of persons.22 These and other invested ways of using abstraction should be understood in relation (and, at times, precedent) to those practices that seek to render or allegorize how queer persons suffer under and attempt escape from normative categorizations. Respect the different ways in which surveillance is endured. But of course, marked positions also imbricate and intersect, and many people live at the margins of multiple identities. Sometimes, this intersectionality is addressed head-on by artists or writers and, at other times, there is a usefulness in focusing on one aspect of identity or on only some of them. Many individuals pivot (sometimes hourly) between the positions they inhabit in a system of cultural marking and categorization. They deploy an array of survival tactics in order to navigate visual taxonomies, surveillance, and compulsory visibility.23 An understanding of the differences between these positionalities (and the categories they navigate) is a precursor to a more complex intersectional analysis of their connectedness. Abstraction as a visual strategy is particularly useful as a means of discussing questions of difference, intersectionality, and power because it asks the linked questions “What is visible?” and “What are you looking for?” These questions, simply put, mean differently when asked from or of positions of cultural difference 70 such as queerness, Blackness, gender non-conforming, differently abled, and intersections thereof. These questions generate multiple, interdependent answers that unfold into contention and connection.24 The conversation about how these questions are confronted across different positions, identities, and intersections can be the basis for alliances, for a productive skepticism about those alliances, for synergies, and for more wide-ranging critical resistance. Indeed, abstraction’s openness might be generative of surprising ways to visualizing such intersections, solidarities, and critiques.