1. A little ‘artistic’: The politics and ethics of outing in cultural history (Full day)

‘Having to hide the way you live because of fear of punishment isn’t a “right,” nor is it “privacy,”’ offered writer and activist Sarah Schulman in 1990. The act of outing—of the disclosure of stigmatised queer identities—has been weighed in activistic and academic contexts as both a protest against ongoing self-degradation and an invasion of privacy with repercussions for the living. How does this balance change when dealing with historical figures and representations? What are our obligations in writing the queer dead?

This session seeks to reexamine the problem and possibilities of ‘outing’ in twentieth-century visual and material cultures research. Outing has a historicity, holding diminishing consequences as societies progressed towards tolerance from the 1990s to 2010s. In our moment of renewed incursion upon the lives and liberties of LGBTQIA+ people, we recall coercive histories of denial, silencing, and censorship. How have these binds shaped aesthetics? What form might queer dignity take against the grain of political moralities?

We seek submissions of 20-minute research papers which deal with particular historical figures, artists, objects and contexts through issues not limited to:

• Explorations of dignity, privacy and secrecy, and their repressive effects
• Queer grammar: reading between text and image
• Interpellation and its risks, including experiences of outing, defiance and/or conflict in collections/historicisation
• Class companionship, ‘friendship,’ ‘confidants,’ and ‘lifelong bachelors’
• Propositions on an aesthetics of the closeted and/or/against the outed
• Considerations of ethical, legal and moral obligations in queer historicisation
• The social reproduction of homophobia in archival, museological or historicising practices

Presenters will be invited to join a closing panel discussion.

Themes: Twentieth century, queer theory, biographic research

Additional format comment: Standard format with the addition of closing panel.

Lead Convenor: Marcus Jack, Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Az Crawford,Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form…