Queer

Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016
2017 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist for “Best LGBT Anthology”

Historically, “queer” was the slur used against those who were perceived to be or made to feel abnormal. Beginning in the 1980s, “queer” was reappropriated and embraced as a badge of honor. While queer draws its politics and affective force from the history of non-normative, gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities, it is not equivalent to these categories, nor is it an identity. Rather, it offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identity and of the dispensation of power that shadows the assignment of categories and taxonomies. Artists who identify their practices as queer today call forth utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships, relationships, loves, and communities.

Rather than a book of queer theory for artists, this is a book of artists' queer tactics and infectious concepts. By definition, there can be no singular “queer art.” Here, in the first Documents of Contemporary Art anthology to be centered on artists' writings, numerous conversations about queer practice are brought together from diverse individual, social and cultural contexts. Together these texts describe and examine the ways in which artists have used the concept of queer as a site of political and institutional critique, as a framework to develop new families and histories, as a spur to action, and as a basis from which to declare inassimilable difference.

FROM THE BACK COVER
"In the introduction to this indispensable volume, David Getsy describes queer art as a brash embrace of disruption and a flamboyant disdain for the normal. From Jean Genet to the Lesbian Avengers, the outlaw sensibilities gathered in the pages that follow fairly pulsate with disruptive energy and beautiful defiance.There has never been an anthology of artists' writings like Queer. It is an antidote to assimilation, a call for radical creativity, and a recipe for artistic revolution" - Richard Meyer, Stanford University

"Queer charts constellations of cultural practice that expose and challenge oppressive norms. Collectively, these tests (as well as the political and creative actions to which they point) defend the precept that differences are different, resisting positivist narratives of assimilation. This collection affirms radical possibilities of 'queer' as a category of cultural and historical analysis." - Tirza T. Latimer, California College of the Arts

"In Queer, forms of sexual and aesthetic dissidence merge and emerge, just as Oscar Wilde predicted they would, as the twin faces of a new sociality devoted to refusing the meagre polarities on offer (gay/straight, male/female, essentialist/constructivist, etc). This smorgasbord of queer writing astonishes in its enormous range, featuring over 80 international artists working in a vast array of mediums, styles and social contexts, united only in their self-conscious refusal that sexuality has any single, knowable predicate." - Jonathan D. Katz, University of Pennsylvania

FROM THE REVIEWS
"Getsy smartly broke with the convention of the Documents of Contemporary Art series -- which often features contributions from theorists and historians -- by focusing almost exclusively on artists. As a result, readers get a fresher, more operative look at the subject." -Francesco Dama, Hyperallergic

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