What does theory do when it takes queer art seriously? How does queer theory remain artful while unpacking the objects, strategies and politics of queer aesthetics? Queer/Art/Poetics makes a claim for the centrality of aesthetic form and formal practices to the work of queer theorizing. Art in our conference title refers not only to the objects and performances toward which theorists are drawn, but also to the pleasurable, urgent, onerous, and productively messy exercise of interpretive skill. Poetics, aurally and textually flickering with politics, gestures both toward literal art production and the art of queer theorizing as creative sites reciprocally vitalized by new objects, questions, and movements. Rather than wedding our central terms into a seamless whole, we propose Queer/Art/Poetics, disjunctive backslashes and all, as a generative hermeneutics. We suggest that queer theory’s ongoing investment in questions of the political might be enriched by guiding its attention away from state and legal apparatuses and towards queer cultural and aesthetic forms where the political is imagined as a transformative poetics of co-habitation.

Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities
Co-sponsored by Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, English, FGSS, Office of Equity and Inclusion, American Studies & Theater

April 23 / Beckham Hall

7PM, M. Lamar, Negrogothic

April 24 / Vanguard lounge

10AM-12PM, Queer Theory’s Excess Flesh: Accounting for Sex in the Archive
Kadji Amin, Katherine Brewer Ball, Amber Musser & Margot Weiss

1:30-3:30PM, Public Privates: Mediations of Queer Intimacy
Laura Grappo, Jennifer Row & Damon Young

3:45-5:45PM, Fugitive Pleasure: Poetics of Illicit Desire
Rachel Ellis Neyra, Ann Pellegrini & Roy Pérez

April 25 / Vanguard lounge

10AM-12PM, Body’s Ends: Queer Vitality in the Post-Human
Jack Halberstam, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson & Uri McMillan

1:30-3:30PM, Extra-Large Medium: Queer Mattering in Visual Culture
Ramzi Fawaz, Darieck Scott & Shanté Paradigm Smalls

3:45-4:45PM, Christina Crosby, Body Undone: Living On After Great Pain

All events free and open to the public.