Curated Selection by Uma Breakdown

Introduction by Uma Breakdown

The theme of this selection is borrowed from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's gothic short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. The plot concerns a woman's account of her alleged treatment for Postpartum depression, where she is confined to an upstairs nursery with nothing to occupy her but the surrounding wallpaper;

'The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions, -why, that is something like it.'

After some time of imprisonment, she begins to see, 'a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern'. The protagonist becomes increasingly focused on this animal-like figure within the fungal patterns- observing that the other is not confined as she is -and eventually the two merge.

In José Esteban Muñoz's writing on Narcissus and camouflage, a similar folding of gender, carceral-medical violence, desire, aesthetics and wildlife occurs. In the myth, Narcissus rejects the advances of Echo (and therefore, 'normal' sexuality), and in turn is doomed to fall for his own image in a pool, eventually becoming a flower. This myth has a large role in the pathologising of queerness, including the anti-feminist misunderstanding of female desire which is termed 'autogynephilia'. As Muñoz points out, Narcissus's desire is not inwards, because he does not recognise the reflection as himself. Rather his love is for nature, which he eventually becomes.

Narcissus, like Gilman's unnamed protagonist, finds a means of escape with desire unbound, and withdraws into the landscape to become something more, safe within camouflage. I find optimism in these two accounts, not only tearing down the bad-faith deployment of medical authority used to victimise and brutalise, but building an exit from those ruins. 

I looked for beautiful artworks which to me resonate with such images of escape and transcendence, and with queer refusal of weaponised pathologies.

• References: 
  Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York University Press.
• Perkins Gilman, C. (1892). The Yellow Wallpaper. Leamington Books.