On Queer Neutrality: Disaffection in the Fashion Photo Story “Paradise Lost”

Abstract

This article addresses fashion photographs as a site for the visualization and mobilization of affects. It concentrates on the visual strategies that are employed to enact affective states that can be read and felt in an image and are manifested through postures, gestures, facial expressions, and clothing. By intertwining Roland Barthes's notes on the neutral with Lauren Berlant's work on flat affect, in my analysis of “Paradise Lost”—a fashion editorial spread shot by Steven Klein for Dutch magazine in 2002 and inspired by a documentary with the same title from 1996—I redeploy the concept of disaffection in terms of queer neutrality and think of its relation with queerness as a way to attend to the performative potential of affect in order to reconfigure styles of being together that collide with rhetorical protocols of emotional intelligibility.

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