Queer Wanting

What do we as art historians want of queer and trans pasts? The discipline of art history—with its coproduction of market value, capital, and artistic legacies—has in many ways constrained queer and trans art historians to articulate their work’s value through the grammar of recovery, lost-and-found histories, or exclusion/inclusion. This panel calls attention to the constraints of this model, introducing histories and methodologies that fit not-so-tidily within liberal narratives of “repair,” “visibility,” “representation,” and “uplift.” It invites papers that problematize or look beyond the ways queer and trans historicities have been called upon to fill gaps, correct erasures, imagine liberatory presents, or herald utopian futures. At the heart of this panel is a desire to engage strains of queer and trans theory as well as forms of history-writing that have been made less popular within art historical scholarship, with its tendency to champion celebratory, optimistic, or utopian views of gender and sexual difference. Talks might engage such theories as Leo Bersani’s “anti-social thesis,” Lee Edelman’s “no future,” Ann Cvetkovich’s “mixed feelings,” Roderick Ferguson’s “one-dimensional queer,” C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn’s “trans necropolitics,” Jules Gill-Peterson’s “trans pessimism,” and Anjali Arondekar critique of queer history’s “archival exemplar.” This panel welcomes papers from across geographies and time periods that embrace “the negative” as an analytic and, from it, chart new ways of relating—and relating to—art’s queer and trans histories.