Meet the Swinger: Polaroid Photographs, Digital Images, and Queer Possibility

Speaker: Dr. Li Cornfeld, (Department of Film, Media, Theatre at Mount Holyoke College)

Dr. Li Cornfeld is a feminist media scholar who researches the intersections of technology, performance, and public culture.

Date: November 16, 2023
Time: 2:30 – 4:30pm
Location: New College Harry Crowe Room (ATK 109)

On digital apps and platforms, sexy snapshots abound. But well before the advent of smartphones with cameras, a midcentury media technology reduced barriers to entry for anyone wishing to dabble in intimate photography: the Polaroid camera. Polaroid invited new possibilities for documenting taboo sexuality, explicit and otherwise. This distinctly queer dimension of instant photography is missing from popular history. Rather, accounts of Polaroid often celebrate a 1965 model, dubbed “the swinger,” for bolstering American sexual liberation writ large. This presentation reveals two ironies at the heart of that narrative. First, by invoking in a mass media campaign a term with titillating connotations for some, Polaroid expanded the categories of erotic encounters that “swinger” signalled, while also muting the force of its deviance. Second, if there is a story about Polaroid cameras and sexual liberation, that story begins with gays and lesbians.