On the Flesh: Queer and Trans Embodiments

Catalog description

This course explores contemporary performances and visual art by queer and trans artists that center the body as a prism for identity-formation, affect, and objecthood. These artists activate their bodies to push back against prevailing cis and heteronormative aesthetic and cultural norms through frameworks and practices, like masochism, beauty, abjection, and eroticism. Drawing from Queer and Trans Studies, we perform formal analysis of their texts, contextualizing them within various institutions and structures of power. We will reflect on the experience of our own encounter with their works. This course surveys the works of contemporary Hemispheric trans and queer artists of color to ultimately ask: what connective threads (if any) can we identify in the work of these artists? What can their work tell us about trans and queer experiences of settler colonialism, diaspora, and racialization?