Barebacking as an Aesthetic Practice

Shortly, Readings and clips will be posted. Soon, the reading group will be discussing the act/art of barebacking, and how this may relate to enacting queerness and modes of queer theory on the level of the everyday (or weekend). We will also explore how barebaking is thoroughly anti-social and death-drive driven, and what this means for what can be called a politics (and aesthetics) of queer. Other questions and insights will also be raised and surfaced -- such as (the rise of) barebacking videos and issues of race, class, body types, class codes, etc.
This reading group will dovetail with a discussion of fisting / fist fucking and lesbian practices of sex as art.

Call for Papers: Embodied Queer

Proposal for the LA Queer Studies Conference Panel: October 2009

“Embodied Queer Theory: Living a Queer Life”
Moderator: Robert Summers, PhD/ABD

This proposed panel sets out to explore subjects who perform their lived body, as a modality of queer theory, on the level of the everyday. As opposed to certain strands within queer theory that remain abstract, and thus disembodied, a close examination of lived subjects, past or present—for example, the dandy, Claude Cahun, Baroness Elsa, Arthur Craven, McDermott and McGough, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, Vaginal Davis, or others—will be explored, and an articulation of how one has, or does, enact “queerness” will be foregrounded.

Some questions to be asked: By whom, and how, is (proto-)queer theory being done, enacted through the body? What “queer” practices existed in the past that are now being enacted in the present? What does it mean to live, enact a queer life on a daily basis—and is this even possible? Further, it is hoped that as opposed to being prescriptive and articulating “how to be queer,” the panelists, via the presentation of specific subjectivities, will gesture toward “living queerly” as an on-going and creative process, which, it is hoped, will open up queer theory as a daily practice of enacting queerness in and through the body, and, finally, what the political, ethical, and/or aesthetic consequences are to “living queerly” in a normative society. Indeed, both historical and contemporary subjectivities will be explored. Submissions from the fields of anthropology, art, art history, comparative literature, English, history, theater and performance, and other fields are welcomed. Proposals that further open up—and even complicate—the questions asked above are more than welcomed.

Please submit a 250-word proposal to Robert Summers at robtsum@gmail.com by June 20, 2008. If you have any questions and/or concerns, then please email me at robtsum@gmail.com

Intersectional Queer Visualities: Call for Papers

Intersectional Queer Visualities

Michael du Plessis, University of Southern California
duplessi@usc.edu

Robert Summers, University of California, Los Angeles
robtsum@ucla.edu
robtsum@gmail.com

This session will highlight different articulations of art-historical understandings of subject/object relations, theory, and visuality as those terms themselves have been transformed through an intersection with “queer.” We wish to trace passages to critical thinkers (e.g., Derrida, Cixous, Deleuze, Rancière, Nancy, Agamben, Ettinger, among others) and the modalities of their projects—and to ask what “queer” practices can, or have, emerge from such critical and creative crossovers into art history? How have theories on, and around, the visual by these critical thinkers working outside of art history been “queered” and put to work in the practice of “(un-)doing” art history—which is to ask how has the discipline of art history become un-disciplined, “queered”? Furthermore, how is “queer” in theory and visuality thought differently when further intersected with post-colonial theories and/or feminisms? Indeed, how has “queer” been (re-) opened to issues such as race, ethnicity, the nation-state, and sexual difference? How have these multiple intersections with “queer” and/in art history transformed it? Do such multiple crossings, thinkings, and doings by way of creative connections and intersections radically change the project and trajectory of art history as a discipline—if only in some of its modes and movements? If so, then what are the ramifications for the future/s of art history and its institutions? These are some of the questions that we want to explore in this session.