Queer Reading as Power Play: Methodological Considerations for Discourse Analysis of Visual Material

This article considers the social productivity of images through a methodological reflection on various ways of presenting and challenging visual materials through textual means. I suggest employing a power-sensitive method of ekphrasis which renders methodologically productive desiring relations implied or performed by the image (in short: engaged ekphrasis). Concerning discourse analysis of visual material, two questions are of particular interest: What does it mean to invoke a discourse through visual means? And what does it mean to confront a particular piece of visual material with a discourse that is not explicitly invoked by this material? Reconsidering the method developed in an earlier monograph, this article asks how one can incite an exchange between a visual work and a discursive formation. Does this process depend on or make particular use of aesthetic forms and strategies, as well as visual rhetoric? How does such an exchange contribute to the analysis of social power relations? What can be learned about the relevance of visualizing practices and conditions of visibility in reproducing or transforming social relations? I introduce the notion of images as instruments and agents of governmentality to develop these methodological reflections. A particular focus lies on the overlaps between economic and queer discourses. I support my arguments through close readings of two commercial advertisements.