Tarrying with the elephant: Queer villainy and aesthetic pleasure in Steven Klein’s photography

Abstract

Through a close reference to Steven Klein’s photo spread ‘John Robinson’ for L’Uomo Vogue in 2003, this article tracks the appearance of the fictional character of the queer villain in fashion editorial photography. It discusses specifically how the register of ‘affectlessness’ is embodied and aesthetically performed by the queer villain. Affectlessness is contextualized within the repertoire of neutral affects that were circulated in fashion photography in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an aesthetic stance that counteracted the normative depictions of ‘happy feelings’ in commercial imagery as well as normative styles of masculinity. Affective states of sadness, alienation and neutrality were enacted beginning in the 1990s primarily by androgynous and sexually ambivalent figures: the stylized representation of such states signalled a challenge to binary ways of embodying and performing masculinity and femininity. After a critical reading of ‘John Robinson’, the article concludes by tracing a speculative trajectory for thinking about aesthetic pleasure in relation to queer amoral characters in fashion visual narratives.