Queer Aesthetics Research Articles

Queering Lists: Culinary and Literary Modernism in The Book of Salt

Abstract Lists, and the practice of listing, provide avenues of insight into Bình, the protagonist in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003). Working as a cook in the infamous Stein Salon in Old World Paris, Bình, a narrative footnote extracted from The Alice B. Cook Book (1954), exercises a linguistic and culinary grasp shown to rival the resident darling couple’s own modernist projects. Demonstrating the narrator’s artistry under the radar, the list represents a formal feature that stages the particularities of queer aesthetics against the humanist backdrop represented by Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. As the novel spans geographical coordinates and varied temporalities, Bình’s curious expression of choice prompts narratological overlooking even as it tracks the desires of diasporic bodies and the taste of cherished dishes. Exercised with remarkable restraint, the generative accretions of running catalogs and errant recipes represent small acts of creativity in the novel. Simultaneously, the practice of listing foregrounds the enumerations as tactical sites of interruption and deferral, to constitute a critical methodology that reflects the list-maker’s precarity as a queer Vietnamese exile. This essay attends to the achievements of a minoritarian character who casts a shadow in the familiar archives of high modernism, as the “superficial” stylistic feature of the list opens up The Book of Salt to larger reflections on the intimate ties between coloniality and avant-garde experimentation.

Anthems of Desire – A Study of R Raj Rao’s ‘National Anthem and Other Poems’

The paper proposes to study R Raj Rao’s ‘National Anthem and Other Poems’, to explore how Rao’s work constitutes a subversive discourse that illuminates the landscapes of queer desire constituted from the wide range of formulations of the queer self in post-colonial urban India. The paper argues that the texts are performative acts that create eroticised topographies created by and from the performance/consummation of sexual acts. Drawing from a close reading of selected poems, the study seeks to illuminate the politics and performance of a subversive aesthetic forged from an intersection between radical queer aesthetics, and the evolution of a queer subject both at odds and complicit with masculine right wing nationalism in contemporary India, a curious mix of free market liberalism, and celebratory post-colonial right wing majoritarianism that has strengthened the old heteronormative mores, rather than dissolving them even as India has decriminalised homosexuality.

Nightwood as a way of life: queer aesthetics, capital, and sociality

ABSTRACTThis essay takes up the question of sociality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. While the issue appears throughout the history of Barnes scholarship, a recurrent theme persists: Nightwood lacks a clear articulation of communal affiliation. While this lack of communal bonding was initially lamented when linked to certain feminist projects, it is now celebrated when linked to certain queer projects. Against the grain of both approaches, I focus on Barnes’s style and link it to Foucault’s project of an aesthetics of self. I detail the ways Barnes is a keen reader of the conditions of relatedness and the ways she emphasizes the aesthetic possibility to transform relationality, to provide a horizon of collective engagement with things and people that might otherwise express only the reification of commodity culture. To do so, I emphasize how Barnes specifies the range of historical demands on queer and gendered affiliation, demands that span literary and art-historical representation and the shaping forces of capital. Finally, by presenting Nightwood as a model for queer world-making and modernist literary possibility, I hope to show how Barnes importantly contributes to questions of historiography and sociality, and reshapes the relationship between feminism, queer commentary, and modernist literature.

Indifference as resistance: Virginia Woolf's feminist ethics in Three Guineas

ABSTRACTFocusing on the significance of the term “indifference,” I argue that in her 1938 essay Three Guineas Virginia Woolf proposes strategies for resistance to fascism and war that anticipate Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of alterity. Starting with the issue of women's difference from men, Woolf develops a specifically feminist critique of enlightenment thought that stresses the potential of women as “outsiders,” and thereby challenges existing political positions. In this article, I trace the origins of indifference back to John Locke and other eighteenth-century thinkers to reveal the ethical and aesthetic potential of Woolf's call for women's critically disengaged response to the status quo. I emphasize the paradoxical nature of the “society of outsiders” to suggest that Woolf lays the groundwork for a queer and feminist modernist aesthetics, one that radically undermines the supposed split between progressive politics and high modernist form in the 1930s. Reaching beyond readings of Three Guineas that focus on the importance of affect, I argue instead for a full understanding of the political power of indifference.

Emcee Etiquettes: Experts Weigh In on How to Host the Perfect Cabaret Night

Gigi L’Amour (a.k.a. Stephen Lawson of 2boys.tv) interviews six contemporary cabaret emcees on how they came to hosting and what their individual approaches are to the role. Hosts are Alex Tigchelaar a.k.a. Sasha Von Bon Bon (Toronto/Montreal), Lois Weaver a.k.a. Tammy WhyNot (New York City/London, UK), Dayna McLeod (Montreal), Earl Dax (Montreal/New York City), Alexis O’Hara a.k.a. Guizo LaNuit (Montreal), and Keith Cole (Toronto). With an introduction by Gigi L’Amour, this article profiles established mid- to late-career cabaret artists from Canada and the United States. These artists work with various live art performance techniques, including drag, persona, improvisation, interlocutor framing, feminist performance, comedy, variety programming, performance art, political theatre, and queer aesthetics.

A Queer Aesthetic: Identity in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Horror Films

Judith Butler argues that every category of personal identity, such as gender, the body, nationality, sexuality, or ethnicity, is predicated in part on a crisis between what that identity affirms and what it excludes. How this crisis manifests itself in everyday life is key to understanding how identities are reinforced, negotiated, subverted, or rejected on both social and individual levels. In this paper I consider three films directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi between 2001 and 2006, arguing that they are especially competent in not only representing ontological tensions of this kind within their narratives, but also in manifesting these tensions so that they are made viscerally available to the viewer as affect. To understand how this is achieved, I draw on the work of Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others, to articulate how a stylistic system, or aesthetic, is developed across these films, and what techniques contribute to its production. I find that key components of this aesthetic include images of touch and performance, the transgression of bodily boundaries, and what Margrit Shildrick calls an “erotics of connection” between bodies.

Bodies of truth: The terrible beauty of queer performance

This piece examines five recent performances from Greece in an attempt to map both their interventions and contributions to the development of Greek queer aesthetics. It provides a chart of this relatively unknown performative landscape and explains how the queering process works in constructing queer ‘freaks’, cultural mourning and a new iconography of Greekness.

Nonfiction as Queer Aesthetic: Score for Five Speakers in Two Acts

Nonfiction as Queer Aesthetic: Score for Five Speakers in Two Acts

José Garcia Villa's Transpacific Queer Aesthetics: Reversed Consonance and Combinatory Orientalism

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“We’re All Born Naked and the Rest Is” Mediation: Drag as Automediality

“We’re All Born Naked and the Rest Is” Mediation: Drag as Automediality

Rainbow coloured dots and rebellious old ladies: The gurlesque in two contemporary Swedish comic books

The term gurlesque refers to an aesthetics that mixes feminism, femininity, the grotesque and the cute. This article explores how contemporary Swedish feminist comic books do gurlesque theory with the aim of contributing to the theoretical conversation about feminine aesthetics and gurlesque. The study focuses on two contemporary Swedish comic books, Jag är din flickvän nu ( I Am Your Girlfriend Now) (2006) by Nina Hemmingsson and Allt kommer bli bra ( Everything Will Be Fine) (2013) by Lisa Ewald. The article views gurlesque as a queer aesthetics, as a form of wilful misinterpretation and taunting of perceptions of femininity. The word gurlesque draws from the word ‘girl’, and questions the connection between girlhood and young age from a queer perspective. Although the gurlesque is rooted in images of girlhood, it has the potential to grasp femininities of all ages.

Queering Glamour in Interwar Fashion Photography

Obviously, glamour is queer. But has this always been true? This article offers queer histories of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lynes's photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for Condé Nast publications, was one of numerous queer photographers, including Baron de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst, who defined a queer aesthetics of fashion photography in New York, Paris, London, and Hollywood in the years before World War II. I historicize what Lynes called the “amorous regard” of his fashion photography through an analysis of his male nudes and the sexual history for which they are a visual record. In this article, I show how both Lynes's fashion images and his male nudes emerged from a market-imbricated queer kinship network to produce a discourse of interwar glamour that accommodated both dominant readings of heteronormativity and resistant readings of queer, white, belonging.

Forbidden Tastes: Queering the Palate in Anglophone Indian Fiction

The ideology of ‘purity’, normalcy and hierarchy through food and its relations is a postcolonial, feminist, queer issue. In an increasingly intolerant Hindutva political climate in India, a politics of enforced vegetarianism-based-purity as a mark of authenticity and ideal national identity intersects with liberalisation of the economy and globalisation of tastes to produce complex hierarchies of taste and ideas of culinary belonging. Given that literary and other cultural products can play an influential role in issues of social change, my paper critically investigates how queer contemporary anglophone Indian fiction reworks dominant attitudes towards abjection through consumption, queering the approach to disgust as a stable marker of unbelonging in the contexts of postcoloniality and the transnational. Specifically, I examine approaches to abjection through food and discuss transgression through food as a postcolonial re-reading of disgust-based politics and aesthetics in two novels: The Boyfriend (2003) by author and gay-activist R. Raj Rao, and A Life Apart (2010) by writer-reviewer Neel Mukherjee—both of whom are part of an emerging group of authors writing in English and explicitly dealing with male same-sex desire in the subcontinent and the diaspora. Using a transnational and intersectional queer feminist lens on disgust and queering through food, I discuss how by challenging the hidden codes of a disgust-based gastro-politics and aesthetics in culture, The Boyfriend and A Life Apart reveal new spaces of sovereignty and self-expression in the everyday. In the process, I show how they provide fresh positions of resistance and subjectivity that complicate narrow ideas of belonging—national, diasporic and bodily—the production of which becomes crucial in the context of carving out a transnational queer (gastro) aesthetics and politics.

14.3 Seconds: Politics, Art and the Archival Imagination

This article addresses John Greyson's 14.3 Seconds [2008], a video about the destruction of Iraqi film archives. This video continues the history of radical form and fabulation that characterizes Greyson's queer film/video œuvre while also engaging the provocative experimentations with archives and history that animate recent Arab visual culture. The essay argues that 14.3 Seconds and a recent video, Prison Arabic in 50 Days [2013], use redaction, translation, archives and queer aesthetics to create new possibilities for the visualization of transnational solidarity and activism.

Aesthetics of queer becoming: Comrade Yue and Chinese community-based documentaries online

ABSTRACT While many studies explore how digital technology influenced the production and consumption of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) media in the Euro-American context, few have focused on LGBT media in China despite its significant growth. Intersecting LGBT media studies with studies on Chinese communication technologies, this paper looks at videos made in community-based documentary workshops, including the Queer University (kuer daxue) Digital Filmmaking Training Camp. Many of the videos are articulations and reinventions of multiple selves enacted through the construction of image and sound. Against the backdrop of neoliberalized governance of selfhood, this new wave of community-based queer documentaries, exemplified by Comrade Yue (2013), embodies the “aesthetics of queer becoming.” Specifically, the expressive personal histories in these videos contest the “authentic” homosexual subjects that function as objects of knowledge in mainstream media. The bodily corporality on screen and the intimacy of the video apparatus operate as an interrogation of identity that intervenes in the ongoing discursive debate between the biological determinist and socially constructed views on homosexuality. Furthermore, video-making itself becomes an act of coming out through confessional or performative modes of sound–image relationships. Video is a vital medium to work through and within the process of identification and community formation. The medium of the video, with its capacity for dissemination online, functions as a unique format that gives rise to a new set of queer aesthetics and politics through first-person audio-visual constructions.

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London * Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain

Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London * Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain

Bachelors of a different sort: queer aesthetics, material culture and the modern interior in Britain

Bachelors of a different sort: queer aesthetics, material culture and the modern interior in Britain

Sinnlighetens slott. Eva-Marie Liffners Drömmaren och sorgen som queert allkonstverk

This article is a close reading of Eva-Marie Liffner’s 2006 novel Drömmaren och sorgen (The Dreamer and the Sorrow). Drawing on theories of queer and lesbian literature and on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, I argue for a queer aesthetics of sensual excess. Liffner’s novel is a mystery without a solution, a beautiful enigma resisting reader expectations of plot and closure. Its labyrinthine or kaleidoscopic structure connects and reconnects a large amount of vivid, concrete figures. I read the novel through five of its key figures: the castle, the sea, the heart, the song and the knight. The castle is the architectural principle of the novel, which features gothic elements such as the trapdoor and the secret passage. The sea lends atmosphere to the novel and is best understood as an element in the humoural sense, permeating landscapes and characters alike. The heart exemplifies Liffner’s use of intensely sensual figures and connects to the genre of anatomical blazons. The song points to an alternative, musical organisation of the novel and works to transcend barriers of sex and species. The knight, finally, is identified as the androgynous hero(ine) of queer literary history riding through works such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood before showing up in Liffner’s novel.

Law in High Heels: Performativity, Alterity, and Aesthetics

Pedro Almodovar's High Heels (the original Spanish title, Tacones Lejanos, literally means 'distant heels') is a 1991 postmodern film that celebrates performance, fluidity, and fragmentation as ways of being in and understanding the world. In a generic combination of melodrama, comedy, musical, and film noir, High Heels tells the story of a turbulent mother daughter relationship, and a judge's criminal investigation following the murder of the daughter's husband (who also happens to be the mother's former lover). In recent years, Almodovar's film has received the attention of Orit Kamir, a law-and-film feminist scholar who opens up a refreshing line of inquiry. Kamir uses the film as a powerful site and as a means to explore alternative feminist images of law, judgment, and justice. In this Article, I provide new insights into Kamir's feminist jurisprudential reading of the film by placing it within the framework of postmodern jurisprudence, performativity, and queer aesthetics. My aim is to reconceptualize law through an ethics of alterity, and to further theoretical developments in postmodern accounts of judgment, ethics, and justice.