Damage: Notes on a Queer Aesthetic

by Jonathan Alexander

160 pages, Paperback

Published June 2, 2026

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Drawing on aspects of Queer Studies, Jonathan Alexander presents a brief but intense series of reflections and interrogations centred on notions of ‘queer damage’ in particular its construction and representation in the work of queer visual artists. Alexander focuses on five artists: Hervé Guibert, Mark Morrisroe, Laura Aguilar, Carlos Martiel and Catherine Opie. Each artist has contributed, in their own specific processes to questioning experiences of pain, trauma and, sometimes, transcendence. For Alexander, Guibert’s autoportraits, produced at the height of the AIDS pandemic, veer between acts of self-love and political polemic. Guibert’s output is considered in conjunction with overlapping creator Mark Morrisroe, part of Nan Goldin’s circle, associated with punk and the radical aesthetics of the so-called Boston School. Both photographer Laura Aguilar and Afro-Cuban performance artist Martiel have explored and exposed legacies of colonialism and racism imprinted on the bodies of people of colour. Martiel’s performances spectacularise violence and the body in pain, considered significant for the highlighting of hegemonic Eurocentric, capitalist and patriarchal discourses. Photographer and academic Catherine Opie examines the mistreatment of the body but in doing so transforms narratives of suffering into acts of solidarity, of refusal and reclamation, ultimately celebrating the potential for the emergence of agency albeit precarious.

Alexander’s caught up in seeking out responses to being born into a world that seeks to inflict damage on queer people – literal, symbolic, institutional. A project that’s bound up with his own sense of self, of the life he’s lived/is living. A life he sees as marked by shame intertwined with the possibility of beauty. His work is confessional, confrontational, deliberately provocative. Erudite yet sometimes deeply, uncomfortably, challenging. Alexander’s blend of essay and memoir’s intriguing, thought-provoking but I didn’t always find the combination as productive as it might have been. But it’s also a book I’m likely to revisit.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Fordham University Press for an ARC