Humanities Queer Art Poetics April 24, 2015

According to the event organizers, Queer/Art/Poetics makes a claim for the centrality of aesthetic form and formal practices to the work of queer theorizing. Art in our conference title refers not only to the objects and performances toward which theorists are drawn, but also to the pleasurable, urgent, onerous, and productively messy exercise of interpretive skill. Poetics, aurally and textually flickering with politics, gestures both toward literal art production and the art of queer theorizing as creative sites reciprocally vitalized by new objects, questions, and movements. Rather than wedding our central terms into a seamless whole, we propose Queer/Art/Poetics, disjunctive backslashes and all, as a generative hermeneutics. We suggest that queer theory’s ongoing investment in questions of the political might be enriched by guiding its attention away from state and legal apparatuses and towards queer cultural and aesthetic forms where the political is imagined as a transformative poetics of co-habitation.