Introduction: The Matter of Abstraction: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Experimental Film and the Arts

In the essays that comprise this dossier, abstraction emerges as an artistic strategy for living in a world that is not conducive to one's being in it. As a strategy, abstraction can operate as refusal, as displacement, as reverberation, as decomposition, as drawing away, as drag, as transmutation, as a prying open, and in many other ways. In this sense, abstraction is not one thing but rather encompasses a multiplicity of approaches that pull on the web of discourse that seeks to order the unruly materialities of bodies.