Pulsating Abundance

This essays queries how in its engagement with archival ephemera Kasra Jalilipour’s video essay Gut Feelings helps expose the historical and ongoing colonial tenets of archival technology. Gut Feelings primarily seeks the possibility early photographic records offer for the extraction of queer value and speculative modes of historiography. In doing so, Jalilipour’s video essay also exemplifies the burgeoning diasporic artworks across a range of media in the Iranian diaspora that are primarily concerned with non-normative representations of sex and gender within visual records of this period and the remaking of queer public histories. The queer archival desirability that Jalilipour traces and speculates with in Gut Feelings, this essay posits, had to be expunged for a colonial desire for heteronormative whiteness that became a primary pillar of Iranian modernity during the late nineteenth century and with photography as its main image-making technological site.