Queer Monuments

In the 1990s, queer theory generated a nuanced framework for considering the intertwined roles of gender and sexuality within, and in tension with, the public sphere. This session considers how these aspects of queerness’s critique of citizenship, the subject and normativity—and its associated prioritization of flux, flow and fragmentation—rub up against the monument, a format associated with both permanence and didactic, authoritative communication.

We welcome papers that consider questions such as: can we speak of the formal aspects of a “queer monument,” and how might these distort received notions of memory and historicization? How have monuments played into artistic responses to the loss or erasure of queer spaces? In the midst of the AIDS crisis, how did artists use and abuse monumentality? Can queer approaches to monumentality dialogue with recent research into monumentality and white supremacy? What lessons do we learn from state-sponsored monuments related to queer sites and struggles versus those produced “from below”?

Papers may consider realized or proposed monuments, ephemeral monuments, monuments to LGBTQIA+ figures or movements, anti- or counter-monuments (as in Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's influential notion of "counterpublics"), or critiques and understandings of monumentality articulated from queer and trans theoretical perspectives. Papers may focus on sculpture, photomurals, or other media; we are particularly interested in the novel and counterintuitive conceptions of monumentality that may emerge from considering a range of understudied queer and trans archives, sites, and historical objects. Papers from all time periods and geographic regions are encouraged.