Nonbinary Difference: Dionysus, Arianna, and the Fictive Arts of Museum Photography

Co-written with Clair Le Couteur.
From Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism.
Edited by Joshua G. Adair and Amy K. Levin.
Routledge, 2020.

This collaborative essay investigates a pair of museum photographs depicting the same marble sculpture: a Roman copy of a Greek fourth-century BCE bust of Dionysus, housed at the Capitoline Museums in Rome, Italy. The first photograph is an anonymous twentieth-century reproduction – with Arianna printed underneath, crossed out with ballpoint – found by Åsa Johannesson in the Eugenie Strong Collection at the British School at Rome archive. The second is a photograph of the bust made by Johannesson in 2017, taken in response to the archival image. The essay approaches these photographs from nonbinary trans perspectives and through artistic research by practice. It explores the assemblage of associations and resonances generated by these images to articulate relations among photography, labelling, gender, museums, and archives. The interconnections in museum collections – links formed between things by classification and labelling, by grouping and arrangement, by histories and myths – are simultaneously semiotic and material. These links are examined beyond the zero-sum fields of true/false or object/label as suggestions of a fictive, contingent mode that comes to explain the possibilities of a logic grounded in nonbinary difference.