Pleasures and Dangers in Adapting and Appropriating Hegemonic Sources

This issue of Framework offers written and visual essays that engage with the practice of adaptation, appropriation, and other processes that reference, relocate, reinterpret, reimagine, critique, and/or expand meanings, structures, and aesthetics of previous works. The essays here take a number of affective, analytical, and artistic approaches in the process of using and critiquing both respected and disrespected source material. The affective response veers between pleasure, laughter, horror, and anger, while the political reworking of an earlier iconic source text interrogates and recenters the work from the perspective of ignored, oppressed, othered subjects. This issue also includes examples of remaking, deconstructing, dissing the "disrespected" text or object, whereas the scholar/artist haunts or troubles an oppressive, privileged earlier source. In all cases, adaptation, appropriation, reworking, and referencing become tools for underrepresented, minoritarian, disaffected, marginal, queer, black, brown, feminist, artistic, and academic subjects.

Drawing upon Stuart Hall's hypothetical positions of encoding and decoding, the artists in this issue use objects, film, and texts that sit in a dominant-hegemonic position supported by a white, Western, patriarchal apparatus that finances, produces, and aesthetically defines what is appropriate, fruitful, and profitable entertainment and art.¹ We see these provocative, challenging newer critical works using adaptation, appropriation, citation, sampling, and other methods to expose privileged and repressive aspects embedded in the original; particularly racist, sexist, homophobic, body shaming, or other oppressive threads that encode privilege and an ideal body and apparatus in the source text's history, structure, aesthetics, genre, and politics. These source texts operating in their spaces of dominant hegemony are often blind to the oppression that they normalize, or perhaps are indifferent to it.

All of the artists and writers in this issue have utilized adaptation and appropriation as a way to remold the original through intersectional histories, personal experiences, and subjectivities. Drawing upon Michele Wallace's discussion of "the politics of location," the "me" of the artist and scholar in relation to privilege is important for all of the work presented in this issue.² Additionally, following Wallace, we might question how art and scholarship deemed postmodern rests upon an appropriation of experience, especially that of the cultural Other. For the work collected here, the "politics of location" comes out of subcultural, abject, and individual spaces, which nurture queer, black, brown, working class, disenfranchised bodies that challenge whiteness, sexual norms, idealized body images, oppressive structural design and labor practices, and other dominant political and affective controls placed upon the subject. For instance, Steve McQueen and Ivo Van Hove, working with larger budgets in their recent work, update source texts that they respect or love but feel the impetus to rework. Even while cherishing the original sources and genres, the video artist and filmmaker McQueen fills in a lack based upon Black, queer, and feminist perspectives that complicate (raced and gendered) genre expectations of documentary and fantasy. Van Hove expands upon the queer aesthetic excesses in Luchino Visconti's 1969 film, The Damned, to reveal a fascination with fascism for queer subjects who were given access to power during Hitler's ascension in the 1930s and the disturbing homosociality and homoeroticism that came out of fascist imaginary.

In a related vein, the artists Sondra Perry, David Antonio Cruz, and M. Lamar critique white racism, body shaming, regulating work culture, and other aspects of oppression in their artistic work. From a perspective of an "evil" adapter—the artist that refuses to comply—Perry remakes objects in digital and office culture to expose how digital images in programming are based upon white privilege and multiply repressive bodily regimes. M. Lamar angrily, although with flashes of humor, critiques and haunts white queer obsession with Black bodies, particularly through the fetishizing of the Black male body in the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. David Antonio Cruz excessively, intensely samples, critiques, and attempts to escape the white, cisgendered, heterosexual popular-media images that oppressed his childhood. These three artists deconstruct, decolonize, haunt, laugh at oppressive source texts from the perspective of Black, brown, queer, working-class bodies and subjectivities. Finally, through the series Fleabag, William...