Out of distracted vision
Thinking at the intersection of diagnostic and aesthetic taxonomies, Out of distracted vision considers the artistic output of sexologist John Money and punk activist Chloe Dzubilo. Working in different moments, one an authority, the other an outsider, both make experimental doodles and invent neologisms—like transeuphoria, mindbrain, and fuckology—to mediate the monotony of the sciences of sex.
Jeanne Vaccaro is a writer, curator, and teacher whose work explores the intersection of aesthetics and the history and theory of trans and queer life. Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, considers the felt labor of making identity and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital | the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is also the recipient of the Alan Bérubé prize for outstanding LGBT public history awarded by the American Historical Association. And with AJ Lewis she co-founded and co-organizes the New York City Trans Oral History Project, a community archive partnership with the New York Public Library.
Jeanne is a Queer|Art curatorial fellow, working with mentor Nelson Santos. She is co-curating Curriculum: spaces of learning and unlearning (efa Project Space) and Adjuvant: AIDS Architectures (Leslie Lohman Gay and Lesbian Museum of Art).
She curated Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics for the Cooper Union (one of ArtNet’s most memorable museum shows of 2015), Reading Room: the feminist art of self-help (Root Division), and Tuesday Smilie: left brain of darkness (Magil Library).
Jeanne is a 2017-19 Mellon postdoctoral fellow in feminist arts and sciences at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University and held postdoctoral fellowships in Gender Studies and the Kinsey Institute archives at Indiana University (2014-17) and in Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2012-14).
