Once Upon a Queer Time: Speculative Histories in the Work of 2SLGBTQ+ Artists

This panel investigates how artists are navigating the various challenges of doing 2SLGBTQ+ history through speculative creative practice. Given that evidence of queer and trans life often eschews traditional scholarly evidentiary paradigms, making it difficult for 2SLGBTQ+ histories to be recognized through typical means, how, as art historians, might be learn from artists? Can artists’ creative methodologies effectively bypass traditional methodological challenges and present alternative models for gaining insight into queer and trans histories? This panel seeks presentations from scholars and artists that engage with questions and themes such as:

• In the face of missing archives and historical erasures, what might constitute queer forms of historical evidence?
• Strategies artists use to circumvent or address the broader methodological challenges of researching and (re)presenting 2SLGBTQ+ histories.
• Artists taking on the role of archivists or historians.
• Artists engaging magical realism and/or speculative fiction as historical methodologies.
• Artworks that reactivate the past in the present.