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

该研究项目分析了质疑社会建构和规范化的性和性别概念的艺术作品。它关注的是20世纪70年代和80年代美国的艺术实践及其与同期发生的社会变革的关系。我们的出发点是这样一个假设，即对具有异性恋规范以及符合身体和性别的社会结构的艺术品的批评性干预应被理解为特定的欲望结构的结果。在这段时间里，性成为一个中心话题，以质疑和谈判的文化形式的等级。在1960年代和1970年代的民权运动之后，女权主义倡议越来越有影响力，并在塑造国际话语方面发挥了主导作用。为了讨论意识形态和制度权力结构的形成，欲望的概念成为（尽管它没有被连贯地概念化）女性主义文化批评的一个中心方面。在这方面，研究项目追溯了这一历史现象与当代学术领域当前问题的联系。使用欲望作为一个启发式的范畴允许一个系统的方法，艺术生产以及他们的历史背景。因此，欲望的范畴应参与界定这些原则，从而性和性别的问题化表现为一个关键的艺术实践本身。这使我们能够进一步询问艺术如何有助于酷儿，女权主义解放身份的社会表达和构成，以及强调视觉文化作为酷儿政治的一部分的重要性。

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.