Aesthetics of Desire. Counter-Hegemonic Visualizations of Bodies, Sexuality and Gender

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The research project analyzes works of art that question a socially constructed and normalized conception of sexuality and gender. It focuses on artistic practices in the US during the 1970s and 80s and their involvement with the contemporaneously occurring social change. Our starting point is the hypothesis that critical interventions of artworks with heteronormative as well as body- and genderconforming social structures are to be understood as the results of specific structures of desire. During that period of time sexuality becomes a central topic to problematize and negotiate cultural forms of hierarchization. Following the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s feminist initiatives grew evermore influential and took on a leading role in shaping the international discourse. In order to discuss the formation of ideological and institutional power structures the notion of desire became (although it was not conceptualized coherently) one central aspect of feminist cultural critiques. In this regard the research project traces a conjunction of this historical phenomenon with a current issue in the contemporaneous academic field. Using desire as a heuristic category allows a systematic approach to the art production as well as their historical context. Therefore the category of desire shall be engaged to define those principles, whereby the problematization of sexuality and gender manifests itself as a critical artistic practice. This enables us to further ask how art contributes to the social articulation and constitution of queer, feminist-emancipatory identities as well as to underline the importance of visual culture as a part of queer polititcs.