Politically Incorrect, Visually Incorrect

Abstract

This chapter moves to an analysis of comix—a contemporary example of primitivism that continues to have a vexed relationship with cultural legitimacy. Ugliness in this chapter is recognizable as the visual aesthetics of underground comix and, as conceptual, nihilistic, and disempowering perspectives outlined as the mechanisms that restrict opting out of stigmatizing political and representational logics. Focusing on the depictions of such restrictions, this chapter explores the limits of allowable and expressible queer identities in the late twentieth century. Examining what affective states such as queer anger in Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Butch (1991–1999) and ethnic anxiety in Erika Lopez’s Lap Dancing for Mommy (1997) look like, this chapter reads visual discrepancies and identificatory impossibilities as specific issues of depicting nonnormatively gendered and non-white bodies.