Queer Art
CALLS FOR PARTICIPATION

On 17, April 2005, graduate students from across the globe will expand the discourse surrounding queer theory and visual culture. This postgraduate symposium will be an extension and continuation of a senior symposium in which postgraduate participants will respond to the relevant subjects and issues. A full day of panels will be organized from the proposals submitted for presentation.

The senior symposium with the same title will be held on the 15th and 16th of April 2004. This event will bring together leading scholars and artists who are at the forefront of rewriting the terminology of “queer.” Invited participants include academics such as Gavin Butt, Michael Hatt, Amelia Jones, Jonathan Katz, Peggy Phelan, Donald Preziosi, and Jose E. Muñoz, and artists such as Nao Bustamante, Vaginal Davis, Sunil Gupta, and Isaac Julien. More information on the senior symposium is available at http://www.art.man.ac.uk/ ARTHIST/visualities/.

The Theorising Queer Visualities Postgraduate Symposium will address broad and diverse issues and subjects that will add to current queer concepts as they connect to visuality. We are seeking proposals that rethink the theories and practices relating to film, television, dance, performance, painting, sculpture, installation, multi-media visual art, and other aspects of visual culture. Some of the questions we hope participants will address include:

• What exactly is queer visuality? Or, in what circumstances could visuality be thought of as queer?
• Can queer visuality be discussed as existing in historical periods? Does queer visuality disrupt the norm of qualified historical periods?
• Does queerness reveal itself in visual ways, and if so, how? Or, what does it mean to create visual imagery or to visualize in a queer way?
• How can we discuss “queering” vis-à-vis “queer,” “queerness,” or “queered.” In other words, what distinguished the use of the term “queer” as a verb/action/doing from its use as a noun/thing/essence?
• What is a theory of visuality from a queer perspective? What is a queer perspective?
• Can thinking about theories of the visual, visual culture, and practices of all kinds (from painting to performance to the Internet and beyond) in a queer way disrupt conventional structures of seeing, knowing, and being?
• Would queer visualities be considered radical in every instance? Or, might they in some ways replicate existing hegemonic structures of vision and subjectivity?
• How do queer visualities correspond to formations of gender, race, ethnicity, and class? Have they in the past – do they in the present?
• How can queer visualities be understood in relation to modernity and/or postmodernity and the structures of visibility and cultural value?
• What, if any, considerations need to be addressed when thinking about queer visualities in the global field of contemporary art? Is queer necessarily a Western concept?
• Is there an association or a relationship between queer visuality and “racial” visuality?
• How do, and what comes about when, queer artists and/or historians complicate the heteronormative narrative and presentation of children and childhood – surfacing their sex and sexuality? How do queer artists and/or historians challenge the simplistic notions of purity, innocence, and asexuality with regard to children and childhood? On a similar note, what comes about when queer artists insert/assert their own queer childhood, and how does this inform/influence readings of their art and artistic practice?
• How has homo- and hetero-sexuality been re-thought, re-worked, re-imagined with the deployment of on-line websites dedicated to sex, sexuality, and community?
• How has normative masculinity been re-imagined over the past thirty years – after the rise of the gay and lesbian movement and feminism?
• What is post-gay? What is at stake in the use of this term?

The closing date for the submission of proposals from postgraduate students is 30 November 2004. Notice of acceptance status will be sent out on January 1, 2005. The submission deadline for the final draft of selected papers is March 15, 2005.

Proposals (250 words) plus a brief CV should be sent to: Robert Summers (co-organizer) at Robert.Summers@man.ac.uk (alt. e-mail: robtsum@aol.com)

http://www.art.man.ac.uk/ARTHIST/visualities/programme.htm

QUEER YOUTH CULTURES

Editors
Susan Driver
Contemporary Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University
sdriver@wlu.ca

Mocha Jean Herrup
Radio-Television-Film
Austin Community College
herrup@austincc.edu

We are inviting submissions for an interdisciplinary collection on queer youth cultures. From the everyday worlds of queer youth self-representation and community involvement to spectacular displays of performative transgression, we are interested in essays that engage with the rich textures of contemporary queer youth cultural formations. We are gathering together essays that explore a broad range of queer youth cultural issues through multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Overview: Academic discourses have historically worked to exclude gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning youth from their research practices and theoretical frameworks. This has resulted in a predominance of heteronormative ways of understanding youth experiences and creative cultural activities. It has also worked to reinforce a gap between academic knowledges and the complex worlds of youth who challenge and exceed binary sex/gender/sexual categorizations. Our aim is to expand critical thinking about youth cultures by compiling essays attuned to the specific contexts, communities and subjectivities of queer youth. Over the last decade a broad range of queer youth cultures have emerged to transform relations of production and reception, as well as expanding public spaces and textual forms through which youth make meaning for themselves. At this historical moment it becomes important to develop tools to recognize and engage queer youth cultures in ways that are respectful and supportive, and that remain open to and enabling of emerging social articulations. Our goal is to challenge generalizing images of youth through representations and analysis of queer youth cultures that utilize detailed textual and ethnographic methods. Reflexive forms of writing are also encouraged as a way to question and bridge relations between youth and researchers. Creative visual artwork, comics and photography will also be considered as an important element to enhance the field of queer youth cultural representation. We are especially looking for new theoretical and methodological approaches to studying youth that enable innovative practices of interpretation.

Topics: We are interested in papers which deal especially (but not exclusively) with the following topics: grrrl bands; transgender youth; online identities and networks; community/festival organizing; theorizing queer youth cultures; youth produced video; film and television representations; grassroots activism; performance cultures such as drag kings, burlesque and spoken word; practices of self-representation; alternative sexual cultures; creative fictions by/for/about queer youth; queer youth visual cultures

Submission Guidelines
Please send a 500 word abstract by November 1, 2004. Send your submission as an email attachment in word along with a brief C.V. or bio to both editors: sdriver@wlu.ca and herrup@austincc.edu. Please feel free to contact us for further information.