Queer Practices in the History of Art Since 1900
Within the second CIRQUE (InterUniversity Center for Queer Research) international conference, Performativity: Pasts, Presents, and Futures, slated in Pisa, June 28-30, 2019, we invite scholars and artists to submit proposals for a section dedicated to investigating artworks and actions in the history of art from 1900 to the present that contributed to questioning roles and social stereotypes, identities and patriarchal symbolic logic, and fostered emancipatory discursive formations.
We shall consider all relevant proposals relating to international art history; we particularly wish to encourage contributions about the history of Italian art, which is still insufficiently examined from a queer perspective. Despite the recent critical rediscovery of long-overlooked figurers (Carol Rama in primis), the period until the 1970s is still a virtually unexplored terrain, and thus likely to disclose stories of resilience and rebellion, deconstructions of gender, sexuality, dis/ability and health status, social and ethnic conformity, and other cultural characterizations.
Almost half a century after its first publication, Linda Nochlin’s classic Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971) is still relevant, and can still serve as a compass in guiding today’s research in an intersectional perspective. Another text by Nochlin from the same period, Letter to a Young Woman Artist (1974) inspires a forthcoming show at Passaggi art gallery, Pisa, that will bring together the work of artists (including Serena Fineschi and Bianco-Valente) who have been asked to speculate about how a similar letter to Nochlin’s might be written today. The exhibition will take place at the same time as the conference, and one of the events of the gallery is being planned as a possible collateral venue for the conference participants.