Jamie Seney

Daddy Sam Wants You is a series of satirical U.S. army recruitment propaganda posters. This work puts a critical lens on both U.S. war propaganda as well as on white LGB people in the military. This work is in conversation with Dr. Jasbir Puar’s framework of “homonationalism,” which describes the ways imperialist states use queerness to signpost modernity and morality while enacting colonial violence. These posters’ texts directly address the target audience, white LGB people, sensually representing the military while simultaneously underscoring the global imperial violence they will be engaging in should they join. As opposed to using lithographic print methods used in historical war recruitment poster production, I contemporize the medium through digital illustration and industrial printing.

Playing with hypersexual tropes of gayness to contrast military macho-ness and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” invisibilizing of sexuality, I invoke humor and potential (homophobic) repulsion due to the collective understanding of the military as a cishetero masculine space representative of a patriotic America. At the same time, I question the actions of the United States military, directly implicating white LGB people in global war crimes where we are quick to absolve ourselves of how we oppress others by nature of our own oppression.

Jamie Seney is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in drawing and video art. Their work intervenes in conversations of identity, particularly rooted in the ways an individual’s oppression interacts with the ways the same individual oppresses. To achieve this, they take advantage of the hyper-propagandization tactics of late-stage capitalism to put identity in critical conversation with race, class, and sexuality.

Following graduation, Jamie will be continuing their thesis work Repo, further exploring the possibilities, ritual and otherwise, of repossession imagined beyond landlordship.

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