Queering Artists' Books: A Queer Critical Analysis of Artists' Books (Unedited Version) (original) (raw)

Queer (Documents of Contemporary Art)

Historically, “queer” was the slur used against those who were perceived to be or made to feel abnormal. Beginning in the 1980s, “queer” was reappropriated and embraced as a badge of honor. While queer draws its politics and affective force from the history of non-normative, gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities, it is not equivalent to these categories, nor is it an identity. Rather, it offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identity and of the dispensation of power that shadows the assignment of categories and taxonomies. Artists who identify their practices as queer today call forth utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships, relationships, loves, and communities. Rather than a book of queer theory for artists, this is a book of artists’ queer tactics and infectious concepts. By definition, there can be no singular “queer art.” Here, in the first Documents of Contemporary Art anthology to be centered on artists’ writings, numerous conversations about queer practice are brought together from diverse individual, social and cultural contexts. Together these texts describe and examine the ways in which artists have used the concept of queer as a site of political and institutional critique, as a framework to develop new families and histories, as a spur to action, and as a basis from which to declare inassimilable difference.

Signifying Queerness: Literature and Visual Art

Living Out Loud: An Introduction to LGBTQ History, Society, and Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019). ISBN: 9781138191921, 2018

Fine Arts and Literature Chapter for Living Out Loud: An Introduction to LGBTQ History, Society, and Culture

QUEER THEORY: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ITS IMPLICATION IN ART HISTORICAL READINGS

IJCIRAS, 2019

In general, Queer theorists suggest destabilizing hegemonic cultural ideals of normalcy. In carrying out this project, they have in the humanities (and in some areas of the social sciences) brought a constructivist view of social thinking that denatures all human experience to domination and reaches a level of approval for an indeterminacy that rejects all claims of identity the emphasis on far-reaching cultural experiences at the expense of political analysis and action, and promotes a historicism that relativizes all thought and culture. Queer theory reminds us to conscientiously study the diversity among sexual minorities and recognize the discontinuity of experience through time and across cultures. In its attempt to build and represent a unified collective issue, gay politics ignores sociocultural differences, historical changes, and multiple identities. Queer theory corrects these evasive maneuvers, affirming the central idea of political practice that "all politics is local," and promoting rhetorical sensitivity to a multitude of listeners in the gay "community." In addition, queer theory reinforces a central message of all rhetorical theorists that activists should remember: verbal expression is persuasive and behavior modifying.

QUEERS READ THIS! LGBTQ Literature Now

Introduction to a special issue of GLQ This essay calls for a reinvestment in queer readings of queer literary objects by invoking the Queer Nation polemic, Queers Read This! Tracing the importance and variety of queer reading as a modality of living, an intellectual specialty, and form of sociality, "Queers Read This! LGBTQ Literature Now" takes seriously how, why, and what queers read. Looking to both Eve Sedgwick's foundational 1996 special issue of Studies in the Novel, as well as the work of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzuldua, and other queer writers of color in the 1970s and 1980s, this essay orients its readers to the ways that queer reading and queer literature have sustained, shaped, and redefined queer life.

"Queer"

Western American Literature, 2018

I propose that we understand "queer" as an analytic keyword whose adjectival (as in queer theory), noun (as in persons who identify as queers), and verbal (as in to queer the West) forms are all integral to the past, present, and future of western American cultural production and scholarship. I propose this understanding not in an imperialistic or totalizing spirit but in the denaturalizing spirit—the thinking otherwise approach—that informs the theoretical and political promise of queer thought within and beyond western American literary and cultural studies. This notion of "thinking otherwise" has its roots in poststructuralist approaches to language, history, and knowledge, such as Derridean deconstruction and Foucauldian genealogy. To engage in queer thought is to examine, destabilize, and undo the (binary) categories through which we experience and know our own and others' sex, sexuality, and gender. When queer studies scholars think otherwise, we engage in projects that imagine new modes of identity and sociality, family and futurity. What we imagine are new worlds.

Queer Theory - Approach to texts

‘Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’ (DAVID HALPERIN). Queer Theory in approaching literature