Leibovitz and Sontag: Picturing an Ethics of Queer Domesticity

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to consider a broad sample of scholarly and popular ethical criticism of Annie Leibovitz’s most controversial Susan Sontag photographs from A Photographer’s Life; those of Sontag nude, sick in hospital and dead. Analysing the ethical criticism of these photographs is a fraught process. The criticism is perhaps rightfully grounded in a discomfort with the impossibility of knowing whether Sontag consented to the publication of the photographs, or even to the taking of the death photographs in the first place, given their posthumous production and circulation. But the criticism is of interest beyond whether it is rightly or wrongly stated, because of what it leaves out in terms of considering Sontag’s formerly private same-sex relationship finally spoken in public through the photographs. Analyzing the ways this criticism is articulated and framed reveals an anxiety about Sontag’s sexuality made public in death. This anxiety is displaced onto the death photographs, which are narrowly critiqued for transgressing a private boundary by inappropriately representing death in publicly circulated pictures. Through this displacement, the criticism forecloses broader questions about how private queer knowledges that circulate in public through popular photographs might open up space for considering the precarious social mobilities afforded sexual minority women to represent, or image, their lives in non-normative ways.