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 Gender remains a problematic term to queer the histories of visual culture in Section 28 Britain. According to Susan Reinhold, the panic around ‘proper gender differentiation’ was already embedded in the rhetoric about the protection of the nuclear family voiced by supporters of Section 28 (Reinhold, 1994). In the first part of this paper, I look at the work of Pratibha Parmar, Sunil Gupta, and Format Photographers Agency (especially Brenda Prince and Joanne O’Brian) to foreground the role of the ‘Positive Images’ campaign in shaping a political and visual discourse that was instrumental to the deconstruction of both heterosexism and gender stereotypes in the 1980s. In the second part, I turn to the ongoing undermining of trans and non-binary citizens in Britain, which has been dubbed as ‘another Section 28.’ How can we interrogate the continuities and differences between the definition of homosexuality ‘as a pretended family relationship’ and the transmisogynistic trope that trans women are ‘pretending’ to gain access to female spaces (Bettcher, 2007)? What role does visual culture play in creating political resonances?

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Last updated: Thursday, 7 March 2024