Queer Modernisms

Catalog description

This course tracks the development of Modernism in America, Western Europe, and specific other locations around the globe, with particular emphasis as to how and why dissident sexualities so often found expression in and as aesthetic dissent. Creating new expressive forms and theories that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, queer modernist artists often replaced dangerous forms of social dissent with more prudent forms of formal dissidence. In pursuing these questions, we will place art in its broader social context, seeking to answer such significant problems as how and why forms of artistic representation that were once transparent, eminently legible to all strata of society, increasingly became, under the avant garde, designed to speak only to an elect, to a select few in our culture. We will ask what happens when art deliberately narrows its audience, and how that narrowing is related to questions of sexual difference. What is the relationship between queerness and cultural elitism, a connection generally presumed in popular culture, but rarely examined academically? And finally we will ask about the utility of forms of queer political dissent if those forms remain illegible as queer to a wider audience. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized.