Learning to write with + through queer art + performance
This publication represents the culmination of a semester-long undergraduate writing course (Theater RIA) at UC Berkeley themed around contemporary queer art and performance. Together, we learned how to improve our writing at the same time as exploring the co-construction of race and sexuality and experimenting with what it means to write with and about art and performance.
Drawing on texts from the fields of performance studies, art history, queer-of-color critique, and beyond, our class examined how queer art and performance practices are visualizing, historicizing, and challenging power, bodies, and desires.
Central questions we asked included:
- What are our conditions of seeing and being seen?
- How are bodies (and representations of bodies) racialized, sexualized, and gendered?
- How can queer art and performance, as theorist Renate Lorenz writes, be taken up in a way that continues “the denormalization it incites, the desire for being-other, being-elsewhere, and change” (17)?
What follows are a series of short essays on individual artworks and performances. We offer them in the spirit of building new and better queer and decolonized worlds.
Shout out to Prof. Leigh Raiford, whose class “Black Art” and the publication “How is Black Art?” which grew out of it, inspired this publication.
