ART & [gender, sexuality, feminist]

In terms of themes of this topic, I am immediately struck with how a) when people mention "gender", they mean women and not transgender/nonbinary/male individuals, because masculinity is perceived as the default and anything other then becomes labelled, as an antithesis to this default, and then divergence from this "default" and "not-default" binary then becomes too 'other' to include. and b) how in terms of LGBT representation in artwork, it takes a similar vein to women and that quote of "do women need to be naked to get into the met", where most nudes are female but the majority of artists in these spaces are men. This translates into LGBT rep. (that i've seen thus far) where, for example take Marc Quinn's bronzes of trans people, where (while I understand that queer sexuality should be normalised and celebrated, it is a statement that can coexist with my opinions of this artwork) it reads as sexualised, objectification, almost animalistic, as if theyre an "other", a spectacle to behold rather than normalise, being the only naked people in the room because the viewers are fully clothed. In the left image, they are standing side by side, an almost blatant visual invitation to connote them to anatomy diagrams, who's purpose is to scrutinise their parts rather than view those as people in their own right; diagrams are diagrams, and we are expected and entitled to dissect what we see in the name of science -- the problem here becomes that, trans bodies are not a science project. The trans body being used as a spectacle for cis audiences is an old old boring and extremely frustrating reality, and is something I want to go against with my own work, be it in this project or in future.

in general I think the messages I want to work with are:

- trans bodies as something normal, everyday, boring and unremarkable, as is everyone else.

- trans rights / any minority rights being politicised is annoying and inhumane, in a way; to take something innate and call it 'debatable' is a shot in the head of every single person affected by said thing, while it allows those who are not involved to kindly excuse themselves from the conversation and just watch those who orchestrate these laws undergo this shooting.

- current war on trans bodies, especially in the law at the moment. although this is a terribly frustrating topic so am unsure if there's any way I want to build upon it other than declare it as injustice.

- From Eli Claire: " “Home:” I mean place, body, identity, community, family as home. I mean the hay pastures, trees, rocks, beaches, abandoned lots, kitchen tables, and sunflowers out back that have held and sustained us. I mean how we have fled from and yearned toward home. " -- this notion, of everything surrounding your identity is your identity is something perhaps I'd like to explore

- also from Eli Claire, the sense that while trans people are transitioned or transitioning, the fact that their experience as previous genders is not any less important (depending on each person), or their general sense of gender as something more broad than what can be defined in language at the moment.

reading thus far:

Towle, E.B. (2002). ROMANCING THE TRANSGENDER NATIVE: Rethinking the Use of the ‘Third Gender’ Concept. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, [online] 8(4), pp.469–497. doi:10.1215/10642684-8-4-469.

introduction of: Getsy, D. (2016) Queer. London: Whitechapel Gallery

"The driving fear is that difference remains invisible and uncontrolled"

"As a recognizable queer politics coalesced, aesthetics were central. Because of the adjectival apparatus and performativity of ‘queer’, it is fundamentally about appearance, in many senses. That is, how does something look and what are the conditions under which it appears in the cultural field?"

"there can be no singular ‘queer art’" --> never going to be a way you can represent holistically in one artwork, all of queer people.

[I wish to get a hold of this book for myself.]

from Eli Claire "exile & pride"

“Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse, abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race . . . everything finally piling into a single human body. To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body, means writing about this entire maze.”

" “Home:” I mean place, body, identity, community, family as home. I mean the hay pastures, trees, rocks, beaches, abandoned lots, kitchen tables, and sunflowers out back that have held and sustained us. I mean how we have fled from and yearned toward home. " -- this notion, of everything surrounding your identity is your identity is something perhaps I'd like to explore

" Today I live in the world as a man, even while my internal sense of gender is as a genderqueer, neither man nor woman. At the same time, I have no desire to abandon or disown my long history as a girl, a tomboy, a dyke, a woman, a butch."

"what I really want is for all the many gendered possibilities in the world to be, not normal, but rather profoundly ordinary and familiar."

ART & // not plonk

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