Author: Jeanine Minge and Amber Lynn Zimmerman
Concrete, Exile and Dust focuses on the performative nature of sexualized identity in Hollywood, the people that live in its underbelly and surrounding valleys, the sexual geographies of the place, and the ways in which sexual agency is mapped on the body and in consciousness. Whereas Hollywood has often been a focus in critical cultural theory, absent from the field is a perspective that collages visual image, arts-based ethnographic and autoethnographic narratives, experimental sound, poetry, and performative writing, in order to juxtapose the conflicting and complex performative nature of Hollywood, celebrity, glamour, and sexual agency. Through ethnographic interviews, performative writing, site-specific photography, artistic renderings of place, and found sound recordings, the authors map the geography of sexual agency in Los Angeles and intend for this work to be a model of the ways in which traditional ethnographic research methods can collage and collide with visual, aural, and aesthetically driven texts to create a holistic and embodied arts-based ethnographic text.