Workshop: Queer Avantgarde

On December 4-5 the workshop Queer Avantgarde will take place at the MaJaC and the RUB Art Collections:

Queerness and queer body practices (cross-dressing, gender-bending) are omnipresent in the artistic practices of the “classical” avant-gardes, as Man Ray’s famous photographs of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy show. Nevertheless, there are still few studies on the intersections of queerness, sexual orientation, gender identity and modernist art. Based on Christopher Reed’s argument that homosexuality as an identity is inextricably linked to the emergence of classical modernism, we argue that the historical avant-gardes are unthinkable without queerness. When Jack Babuscio describes queer sensibility as a “creative ‘energy’” that feeds on the knowledge of a world based on social oppression and situated contrary to the norm, the question arises as to whether sexual orientation and gender identity are ontological for the formation of avant-gardes. What role does queerness play for and within classical modernism? And how does this relate to other categories such as race, class, gender and place? Can there be a “sexual avant-garde sensibility”? And if so, to what extent is it necessarily linked to sexual orientation? In this workshop, we would therefore like to examine the intersections of gender identity and sexual orientation in avant-garde movements of the first half of the 20th century and discuss aesthetics, artistic strategies and practices that are (or could be) part of a modern queer sensibility.

The keynote speaker will be Hongwei Bao (University of Nottingham), our Marie Jahoda Fellow 2024.

The workshop will take place on 4-5 December 2024, starting on December 4 at the MaJaC (Universitätsstraße 105, 44789 Bochum). The all-day programme on the 5th will take place in the RUB Art Collections. Register for the workshop by 30 November by queeravantgarde@rub.de.

Organisers: Prof. Dr. Änne Söll, Christian Wandhoff M.A. and Tonia Andresen M.A.