Queer Art Research Articles

Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere and the History of Global Modernism

Occurring every two years, the Venice Biennale remains a key node for contemporary art. In Venice, in addition to a main exhibition, national pavilions are located primarily between the two main biennale sites, the Giardini and the Arsenale, and collateral events are scattered across the city. Understood as the sum of these many exhibitions, Venice allows visitors and participants to take stock of the current guiding interests and concerns within the art world. The main exhibition of the 60th edition, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, is curated by Adriano Pedrosa. The exhibition first and foremost tries to reunite artists who are foreigners, immigrants, or exiles, especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Pulling from the etymology of romance languages, this concept of the stranger is mobilized to include queer artists, outsider artists, and Indigenous artists. It is further separated into the Nucleo Contemporaneo (Contemporary Nucleus) and a Nucleo Storico (Historic Nucleus) focused on global modernism. Within the main exhibition, the question of how to tell local histories in relation to the globalized contemporary moment emerges through the interplay between the historic and contemporary nuclei, and these rooms emphasize the global entanglements and frictions of modernism. It is significant to organize a biennale that is focused on breaking the Eurocentric barriers of art history. However, this article argues that can only meaningfully be done by expecting the same rigorous approach to global modernism as to the hegemonic Euro-American art histories of modernism.

Provincial Drag in the Philippine Tropics: Towards a Decolonial Queer Tropical Aesthetics

Drag, in its neoliberal permutation, has become the most consumed queer art form everywhere in the world. The popularity of drag is often attributed to the bourgeoning empire of the Drag Race franchise. While the cultural phenomenon that is Drag Race has constructed a platform for drag to thrive in the mainstream scene, it has also created a limited and hegemonic understanding of drag as simply glamour and superstardom. This essay problematizes what has become “homonormative drag” and outlines the need to turn to pluriversal drag aesthetic praxes. It is argued that deploying a decolonial queer tropical lens, following Rolando Vazquez’s decolonial aesthesis and Samantha Nöel’s tropical aesthetics, opens our understanding of drag to situated local experiences in the tropics. This essay, unpacks the aesthetics of what I call “provincial drag,” found in the digital content produced by queer subjects in the Philippine provinces, to illustrate and re-locate the critical function of drag not simply for gender subversion, but also to laugh at neoliberal and colonial projects.

Interview

Resonance guest editor Charles Eppley speaks with Bill Solomon, Jerry Pergolesi, and Sarah Hennies of the Queer Percussion Research Group. They discuss the group’s recently published zine, barriers to funding for queer art, the cis-heteronormative orientations of new music and the percussion music repertoire, and how experimental artistic research can be a productive strategy for community building and self-expression.

Thinking the future otherwise: Queer futures and queer utopias

Discussions within queer time studies often hinge upon a simplistic binary division between Lee Edelman's anti-futurism and José Esteban Muñoz's queer utopianism. This article aims to reframe this discourse, acknowledging its limitations and proposing alternative approaches to conceptualizing the future through a queer lens. Beginning with a brief overview of both the queer anti-social thesis and future-oriented utopias, this article explores alternative, critical frameworks for future-making praxis such as Jussi Parikka's ‘counter-futuring’ and Bahar Noorizadeh's ‘weird-futuring’. Leveraging these frameworks and Muñoz's suggestion to investigate novel queer epistemologies within queer art, the article then examines Zach Blas’ ‘xeno-telos’ and micha cárdenas’ ‘queer prototyping’, as paradigmatic examples of queer future-making beyond the referred dichotomy. In conclusion, this article argues for a diversification of queer time/future politics, advocating for partial, precarious and open-ended approaches to future-oriented thinking; approaches that embrace the unknown, trial and error and unexpected possibilities, thus fostering, new, diversified and radically engaged queer temporal politics.

Medieval re-creation and translation in Edwin Morgan and Derek Jarman’s archives: A dialogue

This dialogue brings together two archives: the Derek Jarman collection at Tate Britain and the Edwin Morgan manuscripts at the University of Glasgow Library Archives and Special Collections. Both Jarman and Morgan were queer artists who reforged the medieval past through visual and verbal processes, including scrapbooking, collage, and translation. The dialogue also brings together two critics, Francesca Brooks and E.K. Myerson, who have been responding to these archives through a combination of traditional scholarship and creative practice. Both in their approach to the medieval past and in their multimedia, visio-verbal practices, Jarman and Morgan’s archives are generative, fluid, and expansive spaces that invite embodied, affective, and creative responses. The dialogue explores what it means to be a medievalist working in the modern archive and how our critical approaches to the medieval subjects of our research might be changed and transformed by this work.

Symbolist Androgyny: On the Origins of a Proto-Queer Vision

This article focuses on artistic and aesthetic practices within the idealist and symbolist movements of the late 19th century in France. It investigates how artists and art critics embraced androgynous imaginaries derived from Greco-Roman antiquity and the Platonic myth, transforming them into tools for social and sexual emancipation and giving rise to a proto-queer vision. An analysis of the art of Alexandre Séon, Odilon Redon, Jeanne Jacquemin, and Léonard Sarluis, in conjunction with the symbolist theories of Joséphin Péladan, Gabriel-Albert Aurier, and Émile Verhaeren, reveals an idealistic pursuit grounded in the union of the masculine and the feminine through the act of creation. Through the examination of artworks, contemporary critical discourse, and the personal correspondence of these art figures, this study posits that the androgyne serves as a heuristic model for a queer art history. The ideal androgyne, as theorized in Freud’s psychoanalytic writings, can function as a methodological paradigm in art studies as a tool for visualizing and conceptualizing homosexuality in art.

Dreamers of the Day and the Living Archive of 1990s Lesbian Cinema in Canada

In this article we reflect on our experiences researching and curating a Canadian lesbian feature film, Dreamers of the Day (1990, dirs. Patricia Rivera Spencer and Philip Wood). We explore how a community-driven approach to archival research is necessary for investigating low-budget lesbian films such as this, and in turn, should inform accompanying curatorial practices. When screening lesser-known queer films, the community networks necessary to their creation and then later for their preservation tend to be overlooked in favor of celebrating the accomplishments of an individual director. If curators of queer film focus exclusively on the finished product and exhibit only remarkable films, they risk missing works that speak to queer filmmaking practices and the importance of these histories to queer community-building. To counteract these investments, we instead consider how strategies of collaboration can inform filmmaking, research methods, and curatorial practices, illuminating the relational networks that make queer art possible.

The Politics of Wholesome Games: Conservative Comforts and Radical Softness

ABSTRACT: Wholesome games are those that eschew dominant fight-or-flight logics and instead embrace softness, kindness, and warmth. While most academic and popular writing on such titles frames wholesomeness as an aesthetic or affect, in this paper I emphasize its politics in an effort to understand how these games variously reify and combat systemic oppression. My analysis focuses on the competing discourses that emerged from the first Wholesome Direct, a video showcase of then-forthcoming cozy video games. I read these perspectives from industry professionals through critical concepts from feminist media studies and queer art spaces, including nostalgia, exit, and radical softness. Through a distinction between what I call comfort and rest, I conclude that wholesome games must wear their politics on their sleeve if they wish to address the systemic issues that make many people seek them out.

The Dissident Power of Queer Art and Curating in Central Eastern Europe

The text aims to explore the political, cultural and artistic implications of LGBTQ+ art and curatorial practices in Central Eastern Europe in the 21st century. Currently, queer exhibitions, are on the rise in post-communist Europe, especially those held in contemporary art centres and museums. They cast light on new queer art and activism and the volatile sexual politics in the region because of the significant increase in the number of artists working with LGBTQ themes and the topical political background of this movement and its impact on cultural debates. Curators are developing innovative perspectives on sexual, social and artistic dimensions of queer exhibitions in this geographic context still seriously affected by homophobic state policy. The objective is to feature three art shows of major queer artists which have been organised in Hungary, Poland and Estonia in the last decade. The exhibitions are: The Survivor’s Shade: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky at the Museum of Fine Art- Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest in 2015/16; Daniel Rycharski: Fears at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw in 2019 and Jaanus Samma. Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale, Museum of Occupations and Freedom, Tallinn in 2016. The three artists and their exhibitions have been selected because they were organised by major cultural institutions in the capitals, they have achieved a significant social impact and huge audience and the artists have played an important role in the contemporary art scene in each country. Their work is a current manifestation of the queer artistic and intellectual culture that has been developing slowly in the region since the 1980s and has come to play an increasingly important role in recent years. The exhibitions and art of the three artists are a starting point for a broader outline of the themes and important figures in recent queer art in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). Moreover, in each case, they appear in a complex and difficult political context related to the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. Hence, I would like to propose a thesis about the dissident power and status of queer art and curating in CEE.

Circulation of Queer Ideas in State Socialist Hungarian People’s Republic

Inspired by Agata Jakubowska’s Circulation of Feminist Ideas in Communist Poland (2008) in the paper, I undertake the case study of Russian-born Hungarian artist El Kazovszkij (1948–2008) to discuss the circulation of queer ideas in state socialist Hungarian People’s Republic. Cold War-era queer cultural production is primarily associated with the then-establishing cultural and political agency of sexual minorities in the West. Nonetheless, despite the hiatus of queer movements or public dialogue in state socialist Hungary, there were still plenty of related works produced and circulated in both alternative and official cultural scenes. However, the lack of knowledge about the socialist era queer lives led to a homogenous image of socialist states: the individuals in question are still seen as absent or viewed as mere victims of the system, who had also no access to knowledge on non-normative sexualities. Therefore, artistic production addressing queer themes is either overlooked or interpreted as manifestations of the artists’ personal struggle, which implies an essentialist understanding of queer art, excluding critical or political connotations of the works and oeuvres in question. My aim is not to prove that queer discourse was thriving in state socialist Hungary. Yet, I argue that queer ideas circulated in Europe between the East and West as well as among socialist countries, offering crucial reference points to artists. Through the case study on El Kazovszkij, it is possible to reconstruct a fraction of these examples from the field of literature, film, visual arts, music, etc., which could contribute to the theoretical and methodological approach to further investigate queer lives of socialist and post-socialist East Central Europe (ECE). Beyond the art historical perspectives, the outcome could become a further step in cultural decolonialism and Piotr Piotrowski’s horizontalism to defy the East-West dichotomy within the cultural history of non-normative sexualities.

Queer Heritage in Central Europe: Desperately Seeking a Queer

The essay investigates the notion of queer heritage with regard to Central Europe and identifies a number of challenges related to the process of researching queer art history and heritage in Central Europe. Having addressed the status of largely “queer-philic” Western historiography, the paper offers a brief discussion of the Józef Czapski Pavilion in Krakow which is seen as an illustration of the problematic condition of queer heritage in Central Europe. Finally, by bringing the example of the 2017 show Dziedzictwo (Heritage), the essay attempts to offer the region-specific definition of queer heritage.

Questões de Gênero e Mais Além: a interseccionalidade na Arte Drag

ABSTRACT This article weaves together the analysis of contemporary studies and a brief repertoire of queer artists with identity issues and their intersectional relations. Through the notion of the body as a territory of political action, we examine how they have addressed, in creation, issues concerning identity, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class, which we consider to be urgent in terms of raising awareness and inciting political transformations inherent in antihegemonic artistic and pedagogical processes. Since one of the authors is a practitioner of drag queen, the body’s role in research matters. Nowadays, the recent category of drag queer and their associated subgenres enables us to engage in a dialogue with the concept of post-drag, as proposed by Luc Schicharin.

FROM FAILURE TO OPPORTUNITY IN QUEERING GERONTOLOGICAL CURRICULUM

Abstract Institutes of higher education vary tremendously in their support of LGBTQ students, which can contribute to unequal educational opportunities and outcomes. The presence of LGBTQ people in education can be inherently divisive, with some states and educational institutions prohibiting the inclusion of LGBTQ-related topics in the curriculum. LGBTQ students who experience discrimination in the classroom and heterosexism in the curriculum may be less motivated to complete program requirements, resulting in lower completion rates. Attrition of these marginalized students can lead to fewer qualified gerontologists who reflect the increasing diversity of the aging population. Additionally, the gerontological curriculum within and across programs may fail to capture nuanced and diverse narratives of resilience and lived experiences due to dominant, heteronormative educational contexts and frameworks. Through the lens of the queer art of failure, the presenter utilizes autoethnography (e.g., analysis of past writing and personal communications) as a queer person in a non-affirming gerontology graduate program. They will discuss how institutional failure lead to enthusiasm for curriculum development, student mentoring, and queer knowledge dissemination. Key findings include the significance of institutional clarity on academic freedom, the necessity of institutional support, and the solidarity of LGBTQ students, faculty, and older adults. The presenter will conclude with their future research directions and strategies to support students and early-career scholars to overcome political, institutional, and what are often felt as personal failures.

EMBRACING THE QUEER ART OF FAILURE IN GERONTOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

Abstract Halberstam describes the queer art of failure as a performance of dissidence in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer plus (LGBTQ+) people willing reject traditional conceptualizations of success. Yet, dominant theoretical frameworks in gerontology are predicated upon notions of success and productivity which may be problematic for understanding the life trajectories of LGBTQ+ people. The use of such heteronormative frameworks has implications for gerontological research in two important ways: 1) Research methods and researchers themselves may be constrained by the normative expectations placed on LGBTQ+ people and 2) Heteronormative frameworks obscure the nuance of LGBTQ+ older adults’ lived experiences and may limit important contributions to gerontological knowledge. This symposium applies the queer art of failure to examine LGBTQ+ aging scholarship that deviates from traditional research and education. Speaker one shares experiences from LGBTQ+ individuals facing dementia, using concepts that counter framing dementia as pathology and decline. Speaker two discusses how participants’ preferences for receiving research results via found poetry may reflect LGBTQ+ participants’ natural inclination to question hegemonic norms. Speaker three describes collaborating with a coalition of LGBTQ+ older adults of color on a participatory action research study, detailing how epistemic tensions shaped the research in unexpected ways. Speaker four discusses how institutional failure led to enthusiasm for LGBTQ+ curriculum development, student mentoring, and knowledge production. These presentations suggest that the inclusion of diverse conceptualizations of success and productivity should inform future aging scholarship, as they may center the experiences of historically marginalized populations such as LGBTQ+ older adults.

Sustaining Queer Joy and Potentiality

What possibilities and challenges does the podcast form afford for historically marginalized counterculture music communities? As a complex social phenomenon, music is surrounded by a network of fashion, film, radio, social media, and more that shape its significance and understanding. In the study of queer music, these networked media are central to unpacking the experience and production of queer ‘world-making’ in LGBTQ+ music cultures. Podcasts, too, are an increasingly significant part of this intricate cultural network to provide a space for gender and sexuality identity formation and activism against a history of oppression and misrepresentation. This article asks, how might we approach music podcasting as a tool for sustaining ‘queer joy’ and ‘potentiality’ for LGBTQ+ communities? Established in 2011, Homoground is one of the longest-running English-language music podcasts featuring music by queer (LGBTQ & allied) artists. As a podcast working to showcase queer voices and sounds for over a decade, the show also provides a case of study to reflect on what impact the shifting affordances of the podcast form have had on LGBTQ+ music podcasters prior to and following the 2014 podcast boom into the next decade with increasing concern of discoverability, algorithmic biases, and digital content saturation. With Lynn Casper, co-founder of LGBTQ+ music podcast Homoground, this article explores the role of podcasting in music’s queer world-making conversation and the particular evocations of queer joy and potentiality found in the show’s ability to sustain within an increasingly oversaturated podcast landscape.

Creating Queer Epistemologies and Embodied Knowledge Through Narrative and Arts-Based Research

Queer people historically shared personal and queer tales, recounted stories of queer joy to maintain hope, and whispered warnings through anecdotes of hardship. Further, queer artists contributed to the shaping of social trends and values through their creations. In this article, we explore how blending the practices of storytelling and artmaking can provide a powerful way to conduct research, co-construct knowledge, and sit within complex epistemological spaces with queer participants. We provide brief descriptions and reflections of our experiences conducting scholarship through the combination of narrative inquiry and arts-based research as queer researchers working with queer participants. Ultimately, we argue that combining these methods allows us to access new, deeper meanings alongside our queer participants.

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Queer Belonging in Durban, South Africa: Thoughts from the Zanele Muholi Homecoming Exhibition

In this article, I seek to queer belonging in a post-apartheid city space. I will do this by taking a queer orientation towards a particular public space—the Durban/eThekwini City Hall in South Africa, and a particular set of experiences I had there during the Zanele Muholi Homecoming exhibition in 2017–18. I will also seek to use these to unsettle the concept of belonging. This queering happens at two levels. First, how the relatively mainstream or institutional space of City Hall space was queered through the exhibition of a black queer artist at the Durban Art Gallery. Given that the City Hall was built to symbolise Britishness in the colonies, this occurrence, although momentary, is illuminating. Second, during my experiences at the exhibition there were several moments which stuck with me. I take one of these which took place with my mother and reflect on it to complicate our understandings of belonging. Ultimately, belonging operates in complex ways within post-apartheid cities demonstrated by one particular place and experience in Durban. For LGBTIQ+ people, belonging is many things. In this article, I demonstrate the possibilities of public art to claim belonging in a city not designed for queer black life, and some of the slippages and productivity of “not belonging” using the notion of reciprocity.

Queer(ing) art, curation and collaboration

This article serves as an introduction to this Special Issue of Art & the Public Sphere on the topics of Queer(ing) art, curation and collaboration. The overall aim of this issue is to explore current trends in queer art, curatorial practice and forms of collaboration. The articles in this issue draw on international perspectives that provide the reader with global approaches to the topics in question. The following editorial is in three parts, the first explores a range of definitions or (un)definitions of queer and queering. Drawing on key theorists to provide context for their usage, we must preface that these definitions are by no means exhaustive but are illustrative of the type of writing available (although authors might also offer their own definition). The second part of the editorial explores a small selection of examples and approaches to queer art, curation and collaboration that we identify as significant. Again, this is not a full list of queer practice ongoing globally, but a small selection of case studies that act as examples that are pertinent to us. The final section of the editorial functions as a question and answer/interview between academic Dr Chris Green and project producer Dominic Bilton about Bilton’s recent curatorial project (Un)Defining Queer, an exhibition held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester throughout 2023.

The uses of failure: Transnational collaborative curation through a queer lens

This article examines some of the challenges, possibilities and rewards of transnational collaborative curation through a queer lens by reflecting critically on my work within the UKRI-funded GlobalGRACE project. There, six teams comprising academics, artists, NGO staff and local participant communities used creative methods to explore how ‘cultures of equality’ can be created and sustained, locally and globally. Our contexts were varied, from trans and queer sex workers battling criminalization in Cape Town, to LGBTQ+ poets exploring identity in Manila, to women construction workers queering men’s work and worlds in Sylhet, Bangladesh. In addition to the themes addressed, we sought to queer the project by challenging the white supremacist, capitalist, colonial, cis-heteropatriarchal structures that dominate conventional academic and artistic spheres in (and beyond) the Global North – including those we were ourselves situated within. My role was to lead the curation of exhibitions that captured our collective ethos and goals. Tracing the project over four years, I explore the challenges of working together across differences, and explain how our approach developed through disagreement, debate, negotiation and experimentation – processes that revealed layered power dynamics and political pluralities and oppositionalities. Reflecting on conflicting views about what ‘worked’ in our initial experimentations, I draw on Halberstam’s conceptualization of failure as queer art (2011) to suggest that apparent missteps in creative work can lead to productive encounters, necessary (re)evaluations and new platforms for subjugated knowledge. The conjoined crises of a global pandemic and severe funding cuts forced us to more fully confront the oppressive structures in which we worked, and to critically reconfigure the meaning and implications of ‘care’ within GlobalGRACE. I close by explaining how these experiences guided our collaborative curation of a final exhibition designed to indict oppressive structures while putting a multiplicity of queer perspectives into productive conversation.