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

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"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."