Excited to share the back-cover blurbs for DAMAGE. Thank you so much to these lovely folks for their thoughtful and incisive comments!

“This work is original and stimulating. The particular method of critique and address is unique—drawing from autotheory and memoir, this author explicates several artists’ work by implicating themself in both interpretation and personal consequence..”—Jacqueline Rhodes, Joan Negley Kelleher Centennial Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin  

“A 'meditation on how to survive with pain' in relation to queer experience and visual artworks, Jonathan Alexander’s Damaged is a beautiful book. It draws on queer feminist modes of deep interpretation, daring to expose the most intimate aspects of the personal and his own embodied proclivities and attachments/repulsions to do justice to the “damaged” bodies of queer culture—his own and those of artists from Laura Aguilar to Cathie Opie and Carlos Martiel. Most profoundly, the book deploys and explores queer images to make sense of how any or all of us survive and thrive with the pain of being human, demonstrating the power of pictures to transform.”—Amelia Jones, Robert A. Day Professor at the Roski School of Art & Design, University of Southern California  

“Thinking about his own intrepid selfies alongside an archive of self-representations by important artist-activists, Alexander composes an impassioned meditation on the aesthetics of queer damage, one that ultimately, astonishingly longs toward the hope and beauty of a broken world. His disclosure of the vulnerable body—his own, our own—is an artistic offering of stunning generosity, a gift no less profound than the very possibility of joy.”—Alice Dailey, Villanova University.