Out of Distracted Vision: Psychedelic Sexology and the Handmade Aesthetics of Transgender
Jeanne Vaccaro

Thinking at the intersection of diagnostic and aesthetic taxonomies, Out of distracted vision considers the artistic output of sexologist John Money and punk activist Chloe Dzubilo. Working in different moments, one an authority, the other an outsider, both make experimental doodles and invent neologisms—like transeuphoria, mindbrain, and fuckology—to mediate the monotony of the sciences of sex. Taken together, their visual artifacts illustrate the constraints of diagnosis and animate a psychedelic boredom in the administration of sex and gender.

Jeanne Vaccaro is a writer and curator working at the intersection of performance and aesthetics, feminist art and archives, and queer politics. She is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in science, technology, and gender studies at the University of California, Davis and co-organizer of the feminist arts and sciences lab, an incubator to decolonize and queer science pedagogies.

Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, explores the felt labor of making identity and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital / the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is also the recipient of the Alan Bérubé prize for outstanding LGBT public history awarded by the American Historical Association.

Jeanne is the curator of Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics, organized for the Cooper Union. With Stamatina Gregory she is curating Curriculum: the feminist art of self-help for EFA Project Space. Jeanne is the co-founder of the New York City Trans Oral History Project, a community archive organized in partnership with the New York Public Library.