Oyster
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Edited by:
Hongwei Bao
This book series aims at providing a platform for original and innovative scholarly research on questions of gender and sexuality in the fields of diversified arts and globalized cultures. The contributors approach their subjects within frameworks of feminist and queer thought, theories, and practice. At the same time, the research monographs and edited collections create a forum where complex disciplinary histories and methodologies entangled with powerful epistemologies can be addressed. As part of a broader critical discourse, the series explores the role of art in articulating queer and feminist politics globally in both historical and contemporary contexts and across genres, media, and audiences. Drawing inspiration from the gender fluid oyster, this book series hopes to foster new perspectives of a transnational, decolonizing, intersectional, transversal and fantastic world of arts, cultures and genders.
Author / Editor information
Topics
Psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious, has provided artists in the 20th and 21st centuries with both a visual language and valuable psychological tools to address the social phenomenon of violence against women. The volume presents groundbreaking research on various representations of gender-based violence in art. The book aims to examine the cultural constructions embedded in this phenomenon and to explore the different strategies that have been developed on different continents to counteract it. The artists featured are Oskar Kokoschka, María Izquierdo, Grete Stern, Dorothea Tanning, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Kogelnik, Marina Abramović, Soli Kiani, Sigalit Landau, and Hava Raucher, as well as the filmmaker Ruth Beckermann and the philosopher Hélène Cixous.
With contributions in English and German and German and English abstracts
This volume investigates the positions of women artists, their institutional frameworks, and the role of other female actors in the art world in Ibero-America and on the Iberian Peninsula from the 19th to the late 20th century, focusing especially on the interweaving of post-/decolonial and feminist approaches. Although women artists could not simply act outside existing power systems, they could mirror them in their works – and thereby challenge them. The overlapping of different regimes of subalternity led to specific strategies of self-empowerment, such as the formation of networks. What role does the fact play that both the Iberian Peninsula and the Ibero-American countries were perceived as a cultural "periphery", although they were simultaneously divided by the colonial wound?
Making queer and feminist positions visible in art is an aesthetic strategy with a political impact that marks a transition from a state of invisible impotence to powerful visibility and political relevance. This volume brings together theoretical contributions and artistic interventions by actors in the field of queer and feminist art, addressing the conditions that confront queer and feminist artists in different geographical and temporal contexts. They examine the potential of art exhibitions and art criticism as media of visualization and concealment, and they also explore the possibilities of virtual environments and feminist graphic design, as well as presenting various ways of making marginalized art visible.
The masculine machine-man, associated with notions of a virile, hyper-muscular male body since the 1980s, is a thing of the past in contemporary art; the author shows this on the basis of representations of male, masculine and queer bodies since the 1990s. While the cyborg figure generally refers either to a militaristic, self-contained masculinity or to a feminine, fluid resolution, an analysis of male-technological bodies in contemporary art is still overdue. The author locates the bodies depicted in the debates on a post-human dissolution of body and gender, while enquiring how these are interwoven with current discussions on new concepts of masculinity and gender.
This publication is dedicated to the changes in masculinity/ies that visual artists have been addressing since the 1970s and are currently working on more than ever. Contributions from art and other cultural studies illuminate the diverse artistic processes by which the idea of masculinity as a seemingly universal, irrefutable constant is being successively replaced by the assumption of a plurality of masculinities. The volume comprises four sections: Postphallic Masculinity, Queering Masculinities, Optimised Masculinity/ies and Vulnerability. Based on the premise that male bodies do not have an intrinsic essence but are socially constructed and thus transformable, visions of future masculinity(ies) are discussed and concretised.
