Viscous Expectations

Orchestrating text and color photography through the lens of vulnerability, Cara Judea Alhadeff explores embodied democracy as the intersection of technology, aesthetics, eroticism, and ethnicity. She demonstrates the potential for social resistance and a rhizomatic reconceptualization of community rooted in difference—and a socio-erotic ethic of ambiguity that disrupts codified normalcy. Within the context of global corporatocracy, international development, the pharma-addictive health industry, petroleum-parenting, and arts-as-entertainment, she scrutinizes the emancipatory possibilities of social ecology, post-humanism, and the pedagogy of trauma. Confronting hegemonies of convenience culture, she lays the groundwork for a reticulated citizenry that requires theory-becoming-practice. Alhadeff’s primary text and footnotes become parallel narratives, reflecting their intermedial content. As she integrates the personal and theoretical with the visual and textual, she mobilizes a comprehensive exploration of our bodies as contingent modes of relation. She cites philosophers and artists from Spinoza to Audre Lorde, Louise Bourgeois, and Édouard Glissant, who have explored collaborative and uncanny conditions of becoming vulnerable. In the context of multiple constituencies, creativity becomes a political imperative in which cognitive and somatic risk-taking gives voice to social justice.