Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry ─ Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture

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 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 sculpted altarpieces, 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.

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim is Associate Professor of Art History at the Hite Art Institute, the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Louisville, USA. Christopher Reed is Professor of English and Visual Culture, Pennsylvania State University, USA.