The Subject in the Frame Aesthetic Opacity and the Reverberations of Race, Gender and Sexuality through the Portrait

Precisely because the genre of portraiture invites attention to a specific individual, and relates this figuration of a particular self to questions of identity and social reality, it comes into conflict with influential theorizations against subjectivity and for ‘the rubbing out of form’ (Bersani) as the appropriate aesthetic for registering the instability of identity and subjectivity. The discrete, and clearly bordered self in the portrait, it is argued, spuriously renders stable a self marked by ‘loss of being.’ Countering the illegitimate framing of social subjects as discrete identities to confine them within social order need not entail a full-blown elimination of all subjects in the frames which seek to portray them. Reframing subjects by citing and critically re-staging their confinement within discourses of race, gender and sexuality, the portrait, I argue, registers the reverberations produced by the borders through which these identities are normalized. The essay responds to the arguments for formlessness and the unsuitability of the genre of portraiture through critical readings of historical and contemporary portraits in painting and photography. Through the deployment of aesthetic opacity (Glissant), the portrait harbours the potential for exposing and critiquing the consolidation of hegemonic notions of (self-)identity. It argues that the portrait pictures the subject’s emergence in the image through aesthetic opacity, deploying an unresolved play of forms to register the conflictual psychic, social and historical relations which reverberate through race, gender and sexuality.