UK Lens-Based Media in the 1980s and 1990s: Disability, Sexuality and the Politics of Representation

This thesis addresses photography, video, and film of 1980s-1990s Britain, to consider the intersecting but often overlooked histories of disability, sexuality, and the politics of representation. I will examine experimental lens-based works by women and queer artists who use citation, non-normative narrative, and fantasy to articulate a felt parallel with bodies culturally inscribed as queer and disabled.

Bringing health to the forefront of discussions on lesbian feminist lens-based media, the project will address the challenge to documentary form in photography theory and locate where these debates were transformed to new ends in disability rights activism and in response to Section 28.

The project will begin by setting out debates in the new photography theory of the 1970s, that in the 1980s and 90s served as a backdrop to the image-making and writing practices of lesbian feminist artists. Theorist and photographer Victor Burgin's contention in Thinking Photography (1982) that documentary photography is ideological, and therefore limited in representing 'the real', was taken up in lesbian feminist lens-based work to posit the inseparability of representation and sexuality.

I build on recent scholarship that draws on the foundational writings of Burgin, Simon Watney and Jo Spence on the politics of representation, and illuminates the convergence of photography, theory and lesbian identity (Guy 2017; Dunster 2017), and community photography initiatives that countered mainstream images of working-class communities and women (Stacey 2020; Klorman-Eraqi 2017). Departing from these accounts, this project will vitally centre the representation of disability as pivotal to constructions of identity.

An intersectional approach between disability and lesbian identity is currently lacking from critical debates on historical lens-based media.

Building on existing understandings of contemporaneous debates on representation in Britain, my research will focus in particular on the Cinenova collection of queer, feminist artists' film and video in London, where there is yet to be any serious study on works related to disability. I will also draw on key collections at the Glasgow Women's Library, particularly the Lesbian Archive; the Bishopsgate Institute in London, which holds the archive of Rebel Dykes; the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive; the Tessa Boffin archive and the Franki Raffles Archive at the University of St Andrews.

To further contextualise visual materials, the study will use interviews held with artists, curators, and activists.

'Crip' and queer theory will form the study's methodological framework, enabling a discussion of multiple forms of identity as they intersect in photography and film (McRuer 2006, 2017; Garland-Thompson 2001; Butler 1990, 1993; Sedgwick 1990). Contemporary artists and academics have also drawn on queer theory and centred disability as a critical lens to view alternative forms of resistance to cultural homogenisation (Smith 2021; Hedva 2016; MacArthur and Zavitsanos 2013; Russel 2001).

This framework will enable me to ask new questions on representation as it pertains to disability, and to posit the study's examples as historical precedents to Crip theory's claims today.

This project will offer new analyses on the touring exhibition Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs (1991), and films that take both sexuality and disability as their primary subject. Works by Parmar, Jacqui Duckworth, Tran T Kim-Trang and Noski Deville negotiate documentary and non-documentary forms to move away from 'positive images' of people living with disability.

These films use fiction, non-normative narrative, and citation as subversive strategies to visually render interior worlds of the self; both queer and disabled. Reckoning with non-documentary modes and non-normative narrative, these films simultaneously interrogate the fixity of able-bodiedness, lesbian identity and lens-based representation.