December 2025
April 2025 Issue Features:
The revenge of ‘tribal’ toxic masculinity: hate raids on Twitch
Philippa R Adams, Maria Sommers, Ben Scholl, Alberto Lusoli, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Toxic geek masculinity is common in gaming spaces, with racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, and ableism running rampant on live streaming platforms like Twitch. In particular, Twitch has made choices to encode certain features that have empowered the proliferation of toxic behavior, such as attacks by users on users that are intended to harass, abuse, and disrupt, called ‘hate raids’. In 2017, Twitch released a ‘raiding’ feature on their platform, encoding a community practice taken from military tactics that they then marketed as a way of building community through audience sharing. The authors examine how this decision enabled the weaponization of the feature against streamers of historically marginalized identities, amplifying existing toxic geek masculinity. They argue that hate raids are emblematic of increasingly common toxic and abusive online behavior targeting users of marginalized identities, and illustrate how contemporary digital media platforms are not designed with safety or care for many of their users in mind. The authors illustrate that uncritical implementation of platform features, without attention to their affiliated histories and cultural practices, contribute to reinscribing the intertwined matrices of discrimination and control, and further empower toxic geek masculinity.
Roundtable on Decolonial Jewish Practice in Art and Visual Culture ‘after Gaza’
Jill H. Casid, Gil Hochberg, Alexandra Juhasz, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Laura Raicovich, and Amanda Shubert
This roundtable brings together leading scholars and curators to examine the intersections of Jewish identity, art, and visual culture within the context of decolonial struggle. Moving through histories of dispossession and the “moral and political decay” of settler colonialism, the participants probe how Gaza functions as a synecdoche and reagent for understanding contemporary conditions of oppression and resistance.
From the “palimpsest of genocidal settler colonialism” to the reimagining of radical relations, this piece is essential reading for anyone engaged in the politics of the image and the ethics of visuality today.
Steve Locke’s ‘#Killers’: facing the inhumanity of whiteness
This article explores the critical reflection on whiteness initiated by Steve Locke’s series of drawings entitled ‘#Killers’, which depict the white perpetrators of lethal violence against Black victims in graphite on paper. Locke presents a subjective take on media and social media images that he reframes as portraits of pathological whiteness. The article argues that, while other artists have powerfully memorialized Black victims, Locke’s drawings critique the ideology of whiteness that defines the perpetrators and determines their public reception. Locke’s careful attention to the perpetrators interrogates not only the relationship between whiteness and power, but whiteness and humanity itself. In focusing on its most pathological embodiments, Locke’s drawings propose an existence beneath and beyond the racialized subject positions that have historically defined and violently enforced whiteness as the face of the human.
A war of words and a feast of books
Although this article deals with literature more than with visuality, its relevance for visual art is the opposition between hostility and what we call ‘beauty’. The core ‘object’ is the literary festival. There, people can learn about, and enjoy, the meanings of these two opposed attitudes in the semiotic practice of the use of language. This is what that use has in common with visual culture. There, the images that are shown also harbour the potential for hostility and beauty to clash. Traditions and innovations are central to both attitudes. The phrase ‘combatting forms’ makes clear how the two attitudes connect, in ‘inter-ship’, just as the two media – language and visuality – do. For, in literature too, images appear. Flaubert may well be the key example of that.
An awkward object, or a 1943 memorial to the women murdered at Majdanek
Inspired by an encounter in the archive of the State Museum at Majdanek, this article offers a reading of the manuscript of the testimony submitted by a former female inmate of the camp, Helena Kurcyuszowa, and the detailed story it tells of a monument she planned, designed and began constructing in 1943 at the women’s (V) field of the camp. The argument draws on methodologies of critical memory studies, trauma and gender studies, as well as a visual culture approach to commemorative gestures in visual, material and spatial forms. The analysis revolves around the concept of the awkward object, i.e. an object that confounds and challenges the researcher, and awkwardness, i.e. a sense that the object escapes normalized historical narratives and dominant forms of commemoration and memory. A memorial designed by Kurcyuszowa in Majdanek is studied in relation to contemporary artistic, feminist approaches to memorials and monuments, and the role gender plays in the processes of access to the archive, the document, and the witness in relation to the Nazi genocide. This study is devoted to a transformative intervention in the memory culture of the present moment.
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https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/vcua/24/1
