Caring for the queer body: Imagining after-lives and post-human futures through art practice in the UK and US, 1980-2000

“我的论文研究了酷儿、跨性别和性别不一致的艺术家在20世纪后期如何围绕医疗保健发展出一种批判性的语言。酷儿的身份认同因传统的医疗实践而变得复杂：我的项目旨在了解酷儿人士如何作为艺术家、活动家、照顾者、病人和幸存者参与和挑战这些协议。当代科学和技术的女权主义理论将为理解英国和美国在重大健康危机之后重新审视艺术遗产的政治潜力提供一个框架。“基于我对酷儿艺术遗产的硕士研究，我将研究LGBTQ+艺术家如何参与酷儿身体的医学鉴定，在诊断、治疗和姑息治疗领域围绕健康协议开发一种关键语言——这些协议往往依赖于‘自然’健康身体的概念，或者完全忽略性别和性身份的差异。”看看佐伊·伦纳德、让·卡洛穆斯托和芭芭拉·哈默的作品，以及伊芙·塞奇威克、凯西·阿克和奥德丽·洛德的自传体作品，我的首要问题是：通过当代理论框架重构艺术遗产，我们能否以不同的方式思考生与死的二元概念？接下来是一系列次要的挑衅：通过新的理论立场重新审视历史遗产将获得什么；在记忆或批判之外，历史材料能否开启对关怀和哀悼与当代酷儿生活相关的生理性理解？读一本像芭芭拉·哈默（Barbara Hammer）的《生命体征》（Vital Signs, 1991）这样的作品，通过学者尼娜·莱克（Nina Lykke）的自传体描述与伴侣身体的亲密关系，对超越生命的联系和亲密关系产生新的艺术/理论思考，会有什么影响？为了回答这些问题，我转向后人文科学和女权主义科学研究，在这些研究中，赞成“编织”暂时性的理论立场有助于放松生与死、存在与不存在的二元对立。卡伦·巴拉德的《与宇宙相遇》（2007）；妮娜·莱克（Nina Lykke）的《酷儿寡妇》（Queer widow, 2015）；和唐娜·哈拉威的《与麻烦同在》（2016）构成了探究历史如何作为“活档案”存在于当下的重要基础。我的项目利用理论和医学文献来研究这些模型是如何构建主体化的。以非二分法的方式考虑这些关系，可以解决生活经验中经常被排除在外的生存和适应故事。从1980年到2000年，整个酷儿群体和支持他们的网络在艾滋病危机中被抹去。弥合艺术、行动主义和医学之间的障碍可以激发变革，纽约的艾滋病倡导组织ACT UP（艾滋病释放力量联盟）就是一个例子，它使美国联邦机构在处理艾滋病健康优先事项方面发生了根本性的转变。2017年是ACT UP成立30周年，越来越多的学术研究以评估该组织影响的重要性为目标。交叉的遗产经常被平摊或被神圣化：我的论文将直接致力于理解酷儿、跨性别和性别不符合标准的艺术家在ACT UP中的角色，以及催化衍生团体（女同性恋复仇者联盟、DIVA TV（该死的干扰视频活动家））的能见度的挫败感。这个时代的艺术家（如芭芭拉·哈默）不仅关注与艾滋病有关的健康问题，还关注更广泛的疾病和护理问题。通过当代医学和理论研究重建这些作品——比如与WRoCAH之间的医学人文联系——将对它们的艺术史相关性得出有价值的理解。”

"My thesis examines how queer, trans and gender non-conforming artists have developed a critical language around healthcare in the late twentieth century. Queer identities complicate and are complicated by conventional healthcare practices: my project aims at understanding how queer persons have engaged with and challenged these protocols as artists but also as activists, caregivers, patients and survivors. Contemporary feminist theories of science and technology will provide a framework for understanding the political potential of revisiting artistic legacies produced in the wake of major health crises in the UK and US."Building on my MA research into queer artistic legacies, I will examine how LGBTQ+ artists have engaged with medical identifications of the queer body, developing a critical language around health protocols in areas of diagnosis, treatment and palliative care - protocols which often fall back on ideations of a 'natural' healthy body or eclipse differentiation in gender and sexual identity altogether. Looking to works by Zoe Leonard, Jean Carlomusto and Barbara Hammer and to autobiographical writings by Eve Sedgwick, Kathy Acker and Audre Lorde, my primary question asks: by reconstructing artistic legacies through a contemporary theoretical framework, can we think differently about the binary terms of life and death? A series of secondary provocations follow: what stands to be gained by revisiting historical legacies via new theoretical positions; beyond remembrance or critique, can historic material open up generative understandings of care and mourning in relation to contemporary queer life? How might reading a work such as Barbara Hammer's Vital Signs (1991) - a tender portrait of intimacy beyond death - through scholar Nina Lykke's autobiographical account of intimacy with her partner's body develop new artistic/theoretical considerations of connection and intimacy beyond life? To answer these questions, I turn to post-humanities and feminist science studies, where theoretical positions that favour a 'braided' temporality help to loosen the binaries of life and death, presence and absence. Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007); Nina Lykke's 'Queer Widowhood' (2015); and Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble (2016) form a critical basis for this enquiry into how history resides in the present as a 'living archive'. My project draws on theoretical and medical literatures to examine how these models structure subjectivisation. Considering these relations in non-dichotomous terms attends to the oft-excluded stories of survival and adaption that come with lived experience. From 1980-2000 entire communities of queer persons and the networks that sustained them were erased in the HIV/AIDS crisis. Bridging barriers between art, activism and medicine can incite change, exemplified by HIV/AIDS advocacy group ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) in New York who effected a fundamental shift in how US federal agencies addressed HIV health priorities. 2017 marks 30 years since the founding of ACT UP and increasingly, scholarship is emerging with the stated aim of assessing the significance of the group's impact. Intersectional legacies are often flattened or canonised: my thesis will directly work towards understanding the role of queer, trans and gender non-conforming artists in ACT UP and the frustrations of in/visibility which catalysed off-shoot groups: Lesbian Avengers, DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists). Artists of this era (such as Barbara Hammer) addressed not only HIV-related health but engaged broader issues of illness and care. Reconstructing these works through contemporary medical and theoretical research - such as the medical humanities links across WRoCAH - will draw out valuable understandings of their art historical relevance."