“The Will to Adorn”: Nick Cave’s Soundsuits and the Queer Reframing of Black Masculinity
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2017-05-04
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This article analyses Nick Cave’s “soundsuits”—striking for their elaborately ornamented forms and vibrant colours—as queer reframings of black masculinity. Drawing on scholarship in African American studies that examines the production of black masculinity in response to racial violence, the article explores how Cave’s soundsuits (produced from 1991 to 2011) can be understood in relationship to the beating of Rodney King that took place in Los Angeles in 1991. This exploration entails tracing how Cave’s artwork alludes to the history of the black dandy, considered by many scholars to be an emblematic figure of the black sartorial imagination. By queering and elaborating on the adornment associated with the black dandy, Cave defies the racist and sexist subtexts of long-standing arguments against display and ornamentation to create a defence against the systemic violence inflicted upon the black male body in the US.
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Lamm, K (2017). “The Will to Adorn”: Nick Cave’s Soundsuits and the Queer Reframing of Black Masculinity. Critical Arts, 31(3). pp. 35–52. 10.1080/02560046.2017.1383494 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32465.
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Kimberly Kay Lamm
My scholarship brings together Anglophone literature, contemporary art, visual culture, and feminist theory. I have a particular interest in the feminist engagement with psychoanalysis, the various ways language figures into feminism, and aesthetic practices such as fashion that challenge the devaluation of femininity. I enjoy teaching interdisciplinary courses that work with literature, art, and film to illuminate the feminist imagination.
My first book, Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (Manchester University Press, 2018) demonstrates the significance of visual and textual manifestations of language to feminist art practices of the late 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the work of three artists –Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly—and shows that their work expressed a shared desire to transform how women in western culture are perceived. I argue that language (as system, text, and speech) was crucial to bringing viewers into that collective project. At the heart of this book is the ‘other woman,’ a figure who encapsulates the utopian wish to reach other women and correspond with them across similarities and differences. To reveal this address, I pair the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey. By tracing the correspondences between these artists and writers, I argue we can better appreciate how together they created the imaginary conditions in which feminism could take hold as a collective practice and a shared idiom.
I recently published Riddles of the Sphinx, a BFI Classics book devoted to Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s avant-garde feminist film from 1977. I read Riddles as an essay film and explore how it utilizes voice, sound, and writing to challenge Hollywood's dominant images of women and to portray maternal care as a legitimate form of work, rich in aesthetic pleasures and feminist possibilities.
In early 2026, my book Writing in the Kitchen with Martha Rosler and Carrie Mae Weems: From Reproductive Labor to the Affective Labor of the Image will come out with Punctum Books. Along with Anna Backman Rogers, I am editing Laura Mulvey: Feminist Legacies, which will be published in 2026 by BFI/Bloomsbury. I have published my research in Australian Feminist Studies, Callaloo, Cultural Critique, Feminist Theory, Oxford Art Journal, Public Art Dialogue, Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.
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