Queer Art Research Articles

Peter Dickinson, C.E. Gatchalian, Kathleen Oliver, and Dalbir Singh, eds., Q2Q: Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance

With essays written by established and emerging artists and scholars, Q2Q: Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance provides a timely snapshot of contemporary queer theatre and performance in Canada. It critically engages with the vital and provocative, but often undocumented work that queer artists, queer performers, and queer theatre companies create.

Intersections of Queer art and African Indigenous Culture: The Case of Inxeba (The Wound)

ABSTRACT This article assesses some recurrent criticisms based on respect for traditional culture levelled at artworks that thematise non-heteronormative gender positionalities in South Africa. More specifically, it reconsiders the stormy, local reception of the South African movie Inxeba (The Wound), a queer love story set in the context of the male initiation rites of the Xhosa community. The article focuses on criticisms of the movie based on the alleged misrepresentation and misappropriation of indigenous cultural practices. It aims to reflect on the complicated knot of problems that queer artists and activists have to navigate in South Africa, including entrenched heteronormative traditions, but also multiculturality and racial privilege. New ways of negotiating these problems are proposed through the development of a more complex topographical account of the intersections of multiple forms of marginality, as well as through the application of multiculturalist theories regarding ways to assist oppressed minorities in traditional cultures.

I’ve Got Something to Say: Gender, Race, and Social Consciousness in Rap Music, by Matthew, Oware. 2018. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland. 240 pages. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 978‐3319904535.

I’ve Got Something to Say: Gender, Race, and Social Consciousness in Rap Music, by Matthew, Oware. 2018. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland. 240 pages. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 978‐3319904535.

Translation

ABSTRACTI offer a personal story, seen through contemporary queer theory, to turn positivity on its head and imagine how the “queer art of failure” disrupts the reproduction of compulsory ways of loving and making family.

Against Chronology: Intergenerational Pedagogical Approaches to Queer Theatre and Performance Histories

Against Chronology:Intergenerational Pedagogical Approaches to Queer Theatre and Performance Histories Benjamin Gillespie (bio) and Bess Rowen (bio) Our intention with this essay is to demonstrate that chronology is not the most effective approach for teaching queer theatre and performance histories. While it is a common practice to map out significant theatrical events through presenting a linear progression of history, especially in larger survey courses, the essay proposes an alternative model that seeks to uncover the intergenerational connections and queer temporalities embedded within queer history. US-focused LGBTQ+ theatre courses taking a chronological approach tend to begin with landmark gay and lesbian plays and performances from the beginning of the twentieth century, including Sholem Asch, Mae West, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Robert Anderson, Mart Crowley, Jane Chambers, Terrence McNally, Paula Vogel, Harvey Fierstein, Larry Kramer, Martin Sherman, Moisés Kaufman, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlam, Split Britches, Carmelita Tropicana, Charles Busch, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Cherríe Moraga, the NEA 4, Pomo Afro Homos, Taylor Mac, Diana Son, Justin Vivian Bond, Vaginal Davis, Robert O'Hara, and Donja R. Love, among many other possibilities. The works of these artists are framed by key moments in LGBTQ+ history such as censorship and anti-gay legislation; gay rights movements; the Stonewall Riots; the AIDS epidemic and the rise of Act Up and Queer Nation; the culture wars; marginal to mainstream representation on stage, film, and television; transgender rights; the passing of hate crimes law; and gay marriage, to name some of the most prominent. But without impinging upon the importance of positioning these queer texts within their appropriate cultural and political moments, we would like to challenge the strict adherence to chronology and embrace the potential for cross-temporal connections between historical and artistic movements. This would serve to highlight the intergenerational linkages among queer artists and communities through a nonlinear clustering of works that would highlight influences and legacies unfolding outside and beyond linear progressions of time. Importantly, this move is not a proposal for an unhistoricism as identified by Valerie Traub, but rather to show the queer potential of an anti-chronological arrangement of queer performance history that challenges the implications of straight time and heteronormative life course models. This methodology, as elucidated below, is influenced by critiques of chrononormativity advanced in both queer studies and age studies. While linear frameworks assist in creating seemingly coherent narratives for students less familiar with the field of study, we argue that chronology creates a false linear-progress narrative that does not value or underscore the dynamic exchange of aesthetic ideas, activist values, and alternative communities embedded in queer history that offer the potential for new perspectives and critiques of the present. Both queer studies and age studies challenge linear approaches to temporality, disrupting static perceptions of the life course that reinforce compulsory heterosexuality for the perceived "good life" and emphasize the false binary between youth and age as well as "peak-and-decline" ideology surrounding the aging process, which positions mid-to-later life as both an undesirable and burdensome position for the supposedly nonproductive older individual within society.1 These homophobic and ageist cultural assumptions, combined with heteronormative standards, undermine the important contributions and lineages of queer elders across theatre and performance histories, [End Page 69] while reinforcing the fallacy that creativity dwindles with age. Age studies theorist Cynthia Port draws important connections between queerness and aging: "the old are often, like queers, figured by the cultural imagination as being outside mainstream temporalities and standing in the way of, rather than contributing to, the promise of the future" (3). Taking an intergenerational approach to LGBTQ+ theatre and performance histories allows students to perceive creativity across the entire life course without privileging youth over age, and also challenges decline ideology by highlighting the continuously developing aesthetic in an artist's later years as well as their direct influence on younger generations. Calling attention to such forms of intergenerational queer kinship and collaboration complicates the notion of progress that serves to displace the old in favor of the young (a reality often unconscious to our college-age students). While we do not suggest privileging the work of the old over the young or the...

On the Impossible: Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and the Surviving Crip

Drawing on my personal experiences with chronic pain, depression, and abuse, this essay critiques both the anti-cure strand in disability studies and the anti-relational strand in queer theory. I argue that anti-cure politics evokes a fantasy of the naturally impaired body-mind, a kind of disabled normate, which ultimately abjects those who cannot transcend their disabilities. Queer theory's willingness to embrace negativity provides a useful counter-point to this impluse, yet its turn to negativity produces its own problems, most clearly articulated in its anti-relational strand. This strand relies on psychoanalysis as a closed symbol system divorced from history, politics, and materiality and touts the self-annihilating queer as the site of revolution. Both the disabled normate and self-annihilating queer risk replicating the mind/body dualism that undergirds Western culture's View from Nowhere and liberal humanism's sovereign subjectivity. Inspired by concepts like the queer art of failure, dignity in shame, the feminist killjoy, and cruising utopia, I ultimately suggest the figure of the "surviving crip" as a generative alternative to dominant culture's super-crip, anti-cure's disabled normate, and the anti-relational, self-annihilating queer. Far from a perfect solution, the figure of the surviving crip is a starting place, a heuristic for critical-political ethics, and an invitation to other reworkings and other reckonings.

Queer as a Bell: Music and the Psychotherapeutic Relationship

Musical co-creation between the client and the therapist can be used as a means of skewing the dominant paradigms of the historically hierarchal psychotherapeutic relationship. This process, known as queering, opens the possibility for new ways of being in therapy space that may support empowerment of both the client and the therapist. Music engagement contributes to an intersubjective dynamic where the therapist's material may enter the session space more vulnerably and authentically than through a purely verbal process. When viewed critically through a queered perspective, this intersubjectivity may allow for a decrease in the power differential traditionally associated with the client–therapist dyad. In this article, a queer theoretical perspective is used to examine the unique role music and creativity play in this therapeutic relationship. Current queer, linguistic, and creative arts therapy theory are examined to support the hypothesis.

James Franco and the queer art of failure

ABSTRACTFor 20 years, James Franco has carved out a celebrity reputation distinguished by its mercurial character. Does he aspire to full-fledged stardom or some new variant of character-actor status? Is he a mainstream figure or a cult fixture, a cultural aspirant or a connoisseur and purveyor of sleaze aesthetics, a bro-ish guy’s guy, a la his dude-in-waiting Seth Rogen, or a queer icon in the making? Evidence for any or all of these alternatives circulates indiscriminately through his hectic, over-stuffed résumé. Throughout Franco’s wildly prolific career – 17 credits in 2017 alone, with another 10 already announced for 2018 – he has also flirted with queerness. Though identifying as essentially straight, he said in a widely circulated interview, ‘I’m gay in my work.’ This essay examines the distinctive aesthetic that Franco’s career articulates. I argue that Franco’s work, in refusing stable definition and challenging traditional notions of artistic quality, expresses a fascination with failure that takes on explicitly queer ramifications in its principle of over-production, subverting ordinary norms of success and linking a kind of artistic promiscuity to his own performances of masculinity.

Metamorphosis of a butterfly: Neo-liberal subjectivation and queer autonomy in Xiyadie's papercutting art

Abstract Celebrated as 'China's Tom of Finland', Xiyadie is probably one of the best-known queer artists living in China today. His identity as a gay man from rural China and his method of using the Chinese folk art of papercutting for queer artistic expression make him a unique figure in contemporary Chinese art. As the first academic article on the artist and his works, this article examines Xiyadie's transformation of identity in life and his representation of queer experiences through the art of papercutting. Using a critical biographical approach, in tandem with an analysis of his representative artworks, I examine the transformation of Xiyadie's identity from a folk artist to a queer artist. In doing so, I delineate the transformation and reification of human subjectivity and creativity under transnational capitalism. Meanwhile, I also seek possible means of desubjectivation and human agency under neo-liberal capitalism by considering the role of art in this picture. This article situates Xiyadie's life and artworks in a postsocialist context where class politics gave way to identity politics in cultural production. It calls for a reinvigoration of Marxist and socialist perspectives for a nuanced critical understanding of contemporary art production and social identities.

A Letter Sent, Waiting to be Received: Queer Correspondence, Feminism and Black British Art

This article examines what the published letter does as a form that is both intimate and public, and how it is particularly resonant when dealing with the silences and absences around queer and feminist artist of colour histories. Connections are made between three letters published in feminist and queer journals and books, written for readers who may include the writers’ loved ones, friends, contemporaries, and future readers. These three letters are contained within the following publications: Surviving Art School (2016) by the group Collective Creativity, a QTIPOC artist group who made the publication as part of a wider project examining the history of Black British Art (members are: Evan Ifekoya, Raisa Kabur, Rudy Lowe and Raju Rage); a special issue of FAN (Feminist Arts News) edited by Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter in 1988, the precursor to the more well-known collection Passion, edited by Sulter in 1990; ending with Himid's recent reflections on her curation in the 1980s through a series of ‘Letters to Susan’ published in the 2011 catalogue for the exhibition Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain. Through close examination of these examples, this article explores the particularities of the letter form, asking if it allows feminist and queer artists of colour to present their experiences in a manner that encourages all their readers to take part in the conversation, whilst prioritizing calls for other people of colour to respond. The article proposes that the published letter form keeps feminist histories alive and creates a counterpublic that speaks to and for a community that is imagined as both geographically and temporally diffuse.

Travesti Dreams Outside in the Ethnographic Machine

This article is a travesti assemblage. It is formed from three different but interconnected sections. The first is a life story of a young working-class Peruvian travesti, Sandra. My reading of this particular travesti narrative is an attempt to mark a queer existence or presence in and against worlds, institutions, and collectives that historically have attempted to erase such an existence. The second is an exploration of the encounter of an ethnographer and an informant. This second section attempts to undo and displace, through dialogue with dreams and nightmares, some of the certainties that the ethnographic encounter has come to imply. The third section introduces the queer art of lying, another form of aesthetic and political reflexivity, and rethinks all I have presented thus far by exploring its limits. The article concludes with a critical plea for engaging with the queer art of lying, in order to imagine new forms of travesti survival, and less cruel ways of travesti death.

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

What’s Queer and New in Apocalyptic Times

This issue of lambda nordica began from a familiar framing in these times: What is “new” in queer studies? As editors, we eagerly awaited submissions in the form of surprising, interesting, bold, and new research from queer scholars. The present issue, as long and late in it’s making as the Swedish government, is the outcome and it presents a number of emerging scholars and topics that are being pursued in PhD theses and postdoctoral projects in a range of disciplines, as well as reflections on new queer art. In this editorial, we want to briefly reflect on the past year and on what we, with José Esteban Muñoz’ words above, might call the “mess we are in” tells us about queer studies and the politics of newness. Do we need to bracket queer in order to let queer do new work?

Fanfic’ing Film

Fairy Tales Film Festival 2018, Calgary Queer Arts Society, Youth Queer Media ProgramFor the study of youth in cinema, we, as scholars, must always remind ourselves that most images we analyze are created by adults representing youth, not by youth representing themselves. As such, they represent an idea of youth—a memory, a trauma, a wish. They are stories these adults tell themselves about what they need youth to be in that moment. Coming out becomes the singular narrative of queer youth, and positions adulthood as a safe and stable destination after escaping the traumatic space of adolescence. The stories in these films provide important moments for adult queers to “feel backward” (2009: 7) as Heather Love says, and to process the pain of a queer childhood. And for young people exploring their sexuality, these stories are essential for at-risk youth who feel hopeless, trapped, or alone.

Hiraeth, or queering time in archives otherwise

Archives are the physical manifestations of our collective understanding of history, a way of proving and so legitimising the existence of cultures, practices, and peoples. However, for queer and trans people of colour (QTPOC), entrance into the archive is not easily permitted; the truths of their lives have been, and are presently, excluded, claimed as contingent and/or rendered “folk”—lesser forms of knowledge. “Hiraeth” is a Welsh word that is difficult to translate into English. It speaks of a longing or homesickness for a place that is no longer, or never was. For QTPOC, the archive is this, a hiraeth space. We use “hiraeth” to describe the liminal space in which experiences of home, media practices, and a relationship to the archive can exist. As two Black queer artists who in their work have been exploring ways to implode the archive, in this article we look at how our practices can expand what the archive holds and further provide a space to render the untranslatable, the im/possible, as archive material. It is a strategy of both redefinition and defiance.

Queer media temporalities

This special issue of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media on “Queer Media Temporalities” draws upon this theoretical tradition and its rich set of concepts to explore queer temporalities that emerge within or may be generated by our engagement with time-based screen media. In its focus on specific media forms, it joins work by Kate Thomas and Jodi Taylor, who explore the intersections between queer time and the formal parameters that govern the time-based genres of poetry and music. Our questions here relate to both resistances and transformations enabled by the encounter of queer with (old and new) media temporalities. We are interested in the way games, television, video and experimental film enable or demand a queer renegotiation of time. Our contributors examine the role that archival temporalities play in the representation of queer lives in history and the imaginative landscapes of games. They consider whether reproductive futurism can help us to think about the queer life cycle of a television series and its characters. How does queer childhood, or “growing up sideways” (Stockton) resonate with film form for filmmakers invested in a nonreproductive queer genealogy? What is the relationship between media obsolescence and the “queer art of failure” (Halberstam, Art)?

Transgender Athletes and the Queer Art of Athletic Failure

Fallon Fox became the first openly transgender fighter in professional mixed-martial arts (MMA) in 2013. Her outing elicited fervent responses from the MMA community, reflecting the barriers many transgender women encounter in sex-segregated sports. Fox frequently faced pseudoscientific arguments alleging innate physical advantages over cisgender women, which are deeply entangled with sexist and racist assumptions about trans identity. For Fox, the only way to prove her “true” womanhood—that is, that she was just as biologically inferior to men as “regular” women—was by losing fights. In this article, we trouble Fox’s “damned-if-she-wins” and “damned-if-she-doesn’t” conundrum by drawing on Halberstam and Muñoz’s theorizing on the queer art of failure. In order to challenge binary logics that structure our sporting world—including male/female, winning/losing, success/failure—and that are specifically imposed upon transgender athletes such as Fox, we employ a queer methodology to center Fox’s voice as she grapples with the meanings and uses of failure. Her insights reveal a productive engagement with athletic failure, which not only challenges sex segregation in sports and the interlocking discourses of racism, (cis)sexism, and transphobia, but allows us to imagine queer modes of undoing beyond the athletic realm of the MMA cage.

Who Slays? Queer Resonances in Beyoncé’s Lemonade

ABSTRACTThis article examines ways in which Beyoncé’s Lemonade incorporates, exploits, and otherwise engages queer artists and their communities. In addition to the inclusion of Big Freedia on “Formation,” a close reading of Lemonade reveals lyrical and stylistic references to queer cultures. Lines such as “Slay trick, or you get eliminated” draw on the language of Ballroom culture. In the “Formation” video queer performers were featured prominently but went largely uncredited and uncompensated. An examination of the singer’s selective support for LGBTQ rights illuminates the complexities of the singer’s relationship to her queer fans and her indebtedness to queer cultures.

The Queer Afterlife of Gossip

This article reveals the formative interplay between the queer art of gossip and poetic practice in James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a sprawling verse trilogy composed with the unlikely assistance of a Ouija board. The poem’s extensive gossip with the dead is often dismissed as mere surface. Yet Merrill, the article contends, indulges in what he calls the Ouija’s “backstage gossip” both to establish a queer relationship to poetic tradition and to confront the pervasive menace of the Cold War discourse of the Lavender Scare, which haunts the trilogy’s 1950s origins. Arguing that midcentury American attitudes about sexuality inflect—productively as much as disastrously—the relationship of lyric privacy to gossipy publicity in Merrill’s poem, the article shows how gossip, in its rich afterlife in Sandover, emerges not so much as a normative threat to be overcome but as a mode of fostering and preserving nonnormative voices, converting the privacy imposed on the homosexual into the conditions for creating queer worlds. Gossip concomitantly provides Merrill with a model of poetic self-performance that at once pushes against and embraces New Critical ideals of lyric subjectivity—a way of telling one’s own scandalous story through someone else’s words, even words intended as hostile, discovering poetic and sexual pleasures where others see only anxiety and dread.