"An Ashgate book"--Cover. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents:
The perils and pleasures of drinking in Will Self and Herman Melville / Carina Pasquesi. Bohemians of the vegetable world / Alison Syme -- The consequences of dating Don Leon / Charles Upchurch -- The song of songs for difficult queers : Simeon Solomon, Neil Bartlett, and A vision of love revealed in sleep / Duc Dau -- Ingres's line / Kevin Kopelson -- "I am a photographer, not a lesbian" : Berenice Abbott's visibility / Tirza True Latimer -- Naked politics : the art of Eros 1955-1975 / Jonathan D. Katz -- The blatant image, lesbian identity, and visual pleasure / Margo Hobbs -- For/against homoeroticism : posing difficulty for the habitual decoders of desire / Nicholas de Villiers -- Ladies almanack, showing their satire and irony : sorrow and sentimentality; ridiculousness in relation to sexual identity; as well as reflections on Alison Bechdel's Fun home, or, Notes not on "camp" / Christopher Reed -- Now and (n)ever : Robert Gober's beeswax time machines / Jongwoo Jeremy Kim -- Hip openers : on the visuals of gendering athleticism / Erica Rand -- The perils and pleasures of drinking in Will Self and Herman Melville / Carina Pasquesi.
Summary:
Augmenting recent developments in theories of gender and sexuality, this anthology marks a compelling new phase in the scholarship on queer visual studies. Navigating notions of silence, misunderstanding, pleasure, and even affects of phobia in artworks and texts, the authors in this volume propose new and surprising ways of understanding the difficulty - even failure - of the epistemology of the closet. Moreover, treating 'queer' not as an identity but as an activity, this book represents a divergence from previous approaches associated with Lesbian and Gay Studies. Responding to the expansion in scholarship in experiences and understandings of sexual identities and their relationship to art, the authors in this anthology refute the interpretive ease of binaries such as 'out' versus 'closeted' and 'gay' versus 'straight', and apply a more opaque relationship of identity to pleasure. Accepting difficulty and opacity as forms of queer pleasure, this book explores the potential of queer theory in modern and contemporary art and visual culture. The essays range in focus from photography, painting and film to poetry, Biblical text, lesbian humor, and even botany. Evaluating the most recent critical theories and introducing them in close examinations of objects and texts, this is the first book to take up the study of queer visual culture.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.