College Art Association, Queer Caucus for Art: 2020 Panel

Hilton Chicago, Lobby Level, Continental B 720 S Michigan Ave
February 14, 4 – 5:30 PM

Moderator: Thea Quiray Tagle PhD
Panelists: Sky Cubacub, Joshua Chambers-Letson PhD, Andrew Gayed

Pushing up against a singular codification of queerness, In the Teeth of Empire draws upon the multiplicity of queer orientations often framed by the conditions and histories of heteronormative settler violence. Parallel to the work outlined by anthropologist Audra Simpson and Indigenous and queer studies scholar Mark Rifkin, queer bodies have often been marked as different from settler colonial frameworks that have shaped normative ways of being. While the language of refusal has often been employed as a strategy for self-determination within conditions of exclusion, queer bodies have needed to exist within and in spite of these heteronormative structures.

In particular, trans*, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming bodies have historically troubled the ways queer identity formations have been narrativized, making a mess of the language, discourse, and visual remnants of those experiences. While heteronormative structures have historically attempted to coerce queer bodies from recognition based around tropes of difference, this exhibition In the Teeth of Empire uses the specificity of experiences that begin to enable more inclusive and complex sensibilities of being – where a multiplicity of orientations disrupt singularizing these narratives.