Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, the OB-Scene

Orchestrating text and color photography through the lens of vulnerability, Cara Judea Alhadeff explores embodied democracy as the intersection of technology, aesthetics, eroticism, and ethnicity. She demonstrates the potential for social resistance, a rhizomatic re-conceptualization of community rooted in difference-a socio-erotic ethic of ambiguity that disrupts codified normalcy. Within the context of global corporatocracy, international development, the pharma-addictive health industry, petroleum-parenting, and arts-as-entertainment, she scrutinizes the emancipatory possibilities of social ecology, post-humanism, and the pedagogy of trauma. She investigates how misogyny, racial hygiene, and anti-intellectualism configure the troubled yet vital concept of equality.

The non-hierarchical structure of her text reflects its intermedial content in which her primary text and footnotes become parallel and interconnecting narratives. As she integrates the personal and theoretical with the visual and textual, Alhadeff mobilizes a comprehensive exploration of our bodies as contingent modes of relation. Confronting hegemonies of convenience-culture inscribed in the current crisis of agency in the US, she lays the groundwork for a reticulated citizenry that requires theory-becoming-practice. Artists, scientists, and philosophers from Spinoza, Audre Lorde, Louise Bourgeois, and Edouard Glissant have explored these collaborative conditions of becoming-vulnerable as an enfoldment of uncertainty and the uncanny. In the context of multiple constituencies, creativity becomes a political imperative in which cognitive / somatic risk-taking gives voice to social justice.