Mystically Perverse: Towards a Queer Semiology of Breton Male Bodies

April 1, 2005

Paintings are not mere illusions about the world but determined and produced allusions to it. Art history must acknowledge these complexities and work on these real social processes, significations and their interactions and relations. Art history which is also a practice of representation must provide complex accounts (Orton and Pollock,...

Utopia and Castration: How to Read the History of Homosexuality

Nov. 1, 2003

[1] For more than twenty years now, as I’m sure you know, scholars, theorists, and historians of sexuality have been engaged in a heated debate over the relationship between homosexuality, history, and society. Commonly referred to as the essentialist/constructionist debate, the controversy has centered around whether modern conceptions of homosexual...

Memories of Bilitis: Marie Laurencin beyond the Cubist Context

Aug. 1, 2002

The lesbian is the heroine of modernism. – Walter Benjamin (90) [1] In scholarly examinations of the period prior to the First World War, Marie Laurencin’s work has been viewed almost exclusively as a footnote to early twentieth-century French modernism, important primarily for its recording of the youthful visages of...

Cutting through Narcissism: Queer Visibility in Scorpio Rising

July 2, 2002

[1] In the early 1960s, a group of artists and filmmakers working primarily in New York City began to make and exhibit films that displayed the kind of willful excesses that would later define the decade as a period of cultural and sexual upheaval. For many audiences of the time,...

Labor Camp: Brett Farmer interviews Matthew Tinkcom about his New Book, Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema

July 2, 2002

[1] FARMER: If as Susan Sontag claims in a celebrated formulation, “to talk about Camp [is] to betray it” (105), contemporary cultural theory might seem the site of a veritable mass treason. From Sontag’s own seminal contribution onward, an increasingly voluminous literature on camp has developed to the point where...

Whatever Turns You On: Becoming-Lesbian and the Production of Desire in the Xenaverse

Oct. 1, 2001

[1] At the end of the Xena: Warrior Princess episode, “The Play’s the Thing,” in which Gabrielle directs her own play, Minya, with her new friend Paulina in tow, exclaims: Gabrielle, I wanted to thank you. I never would have met Paulina here if it wasn’t for you. In fact,...

The Evolution of a Lesbian Icon: Annamarie Jagose interviews Laura Doan about her New Book, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture

July 2, 2001

[1] JAGOSE: Your book, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, constructs a genealogy of what you term Sapphic modernity. The 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness is very prominent in your account, as it is in most histories that trace the post-war...

Disentangling the Strangled Tehuana: The Nationalist Antinomy in Frida Kahlo’s “What the Water Has Given Me”

June 1, 2001

[1] The objective of this study is to articulate a revisionary reading of Frida Kahlo's "What the Water Has Given Me" ["Lo que el agua me ha dado" 1 ] (1938, Fig. 1), a reading that will argue for the painting's central importance for an understanding of Kahlo's œuvre in...

Hollywood Homosexuals: Annamarie Jagose interviews Brett Farmer about His New Book, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships

Feb. 1, 2001

[1] JAGOSE: Your book on gay male spectatorships notes the cultural persistence, both homophobic and anti-homophobic, in reading the movie fan and the male homosexual in terms of each other. (figure 1) Indeed, a couple of times you offer incidents from your childhood – your grandmother’s gift to you, aged...

Hollywood Lesbians: Annamarie Jagose interviews Patricia White about Her Latest Book, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability

Oct. 1, 2000

[1] JAGOSE: Given the Motion Picture Production Code’s determination to corral “sex perversion” outside the cinematic field of vision, classical Hollywood cinema might not seem a promising archive for the consideration of lesbian representability. Can you talk me through what your book takes as its founding paradox, the Production Code’s...

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