Tamara de Lempicka's Portrait of the Duchess of La Salle 

(1925) & La Bella Rafaela (1927)

Lempicka was an important Polish Art Deco painter who was bisexual & sorta known for her lady love triangles, in which she was varying degrees (haha "degrees" sounds so weird...) away from other famous artists of the time, like Virgina Wolf.

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Autoportrait  (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) (1925)

 Young Girl with Gloves (1929)

<3

The Adventures of Don Juan!

Glorious romance for all who thrill to love!

"...From the debris, there appeared on the one hand infractions against the legislation (or morality) pertaining to marriage and the family, and on the other, offenses against the regularity of a natural function (offenses which, it must be added, the law was apt to punish).  Here we have a likely reason, among others, for the prestige of Don Juan, which three centuries have not erased.  Underneath the great violator of the rules of marriage - stealer of wives, seducer of virgins, the shame of families, and an insult to husbands and fathers - another personage can be glimpsed: the individual driven, in spite of himself, by the somber madness of sex.  Underneath the libertine, the pervert.  He deliberately breaks the law, but at the same time, something like a nature gone awry transports him far from all nature; his death is the moment when the supernatural return of the crime and its retribution thwarts the flight into counternature.  There were two great systems conceived by the west for governing sex: the law of marriage and the order of desires - and the life of Don Juan overturned them both.  We shall leave it to psychoanalysts to speculate whether he was homosexual, narcissistic, or impotent."
Michel Foucault
History of Sexuality Vol. I
The Perverse Implantation
pages 39-40
 

David Wojnarowicz self-potrait and Untitled (portrait of Ross in LA) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Hide/Seek

"This is the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture. “Hide/Seek” considers such themes as the role of sexual difference in depicting modern America; how artists explored the fluidity of sexuality and gender; how major themes in modern art—especially abstraction—were influenced by social marginalization; and how art reflected society’s evolving and changing attitudes toward sexuality, desire, and romantic attachment."

"Hide/Seek" website

finding the queer in everything...

.... a la Eve Kofosky Sedgewick.

AIDS tribute

found this artwork by David Wojnarowicz, from his collection titled "Sex Series"

If you can't read the text in the photo, this is what it says:

"In 1983 this boy was born into the middle of a deadly epidemic. It would be decades before he understands the severity of his situation and the ghosts haunting his unclaimed and abandoned histories of sexual liberation. Had he been born decades earlier like his sister, his lifeless diseased body would be just one among hundreds of thousands of other boys just like him rotting in the ground. But he lived, only to inherit a world steeped in fear and hatred of his tiny little body and the desires he would pursue before long. Feared and hated because he will soon learn what it is like to find pleasure in the naked bodies of other boys. He will be faced with the all consuming anxiety of safer sex paranoia and the panic that ensues when waking up with the most mild of fevers and chills. But he will carry on despite the daunting “I hope you die of AIDS faggot” taunting because the dangerous pleasures he will intimately know are both sustaining and addictive. “Every time we fuck, we win”, he will someday whisper in his two lovers’ ears, reassuring himself as much as them that every day they stay alive is a revolutionary act; their desperate pleasures becoming the most insurrectionary moments of defiance imaginable in a world that would just as soon leave them for dead…"

[copy from original email]
Hey All :)
I am still reflecting on our closing questions around discourse and can-we-think-outside-of-it.  I'm inclined to say no.  Lately I've been thinking many things-as-i-know-them, commonsense (ideological) things embedded in my/our world such as (and particularly) oppositional binaries, can be best described as odd compasses.  So I was excited in our reading when Turner said: "Foucault did not argue against Cartesian dualism; he treated it as an interesting historical phenomenon that no longer seems applicable," (Turner p. 41).  this makes sense, because saying dualism is good or bad is obvs binary thinking.

So I'm inclined to think I can't escape the discourse of my time, so i brainstormed a list of stuff i think i can do:
redefine things
expand meanings
write-back (jenkins...henry jenkins?)
unlearn (yoda?)
continue to make dense concepts more accessible
be in dialogue about more stuff with more people
deepen the dialogue
flexible stances
hoping for feedback/being receptive
giving feedback/being loving
serious privilege accountability
allyship. ally space ships
hold space for contradictions
moving from either/or to both/and (bowen theoryy),
think of binaries instead as spectrums..
notice tropes
and dispositifs
pull teeth
be aware when i'm navigating with an odd compass
pull teeth
pull teeth
don't let people die from rotting teeth
make nouns verbs (I'm womanning!)
fan fiction/productive-consumption
renegotiate the terms.
utopian longing...

...I woke up this morning and no joke The Adventures of Don Juan was on Turner Classic Movies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHbx0k9k4pE
watch the trailer.  seriously it was amazing.  Please notice his incredible asymmetrical earring.  His love for beauty... ahahahaha
Okay.  See you all tomorrow.
love,
Addie

hahahahahha

my favorite is Uhura.... she's just like ...OKAY.

the ally ship

hop on board the ally space ship!! inspired by addie.

 here's the dorsey performance.

lovely template, kaitlin! just to forewarn you all, I'm about to blow up this blog...

[copy of original email]

Hey y’all,

I wanted to send this to share with you all a little bit of my process from the first part of class today. I had such a huge emotional reaction to the interview we all read!! For a lot of reasons, but mostly I was floored and a little pissed that I had never really learned that piece of my history as a queer person. And obviously I’d heard of the AIDS crisis as a gay issue but the first time I really deeply encountered what that actually meant was like, when the movie Rent came out in my sophomore year of high school!! What the fuck!

I guess what I was feeling, and wanted to express in class but didn’t, was that I can’t believe how hugely disconnected I am to queer history, and am feeling a lot of rage and sense of loss at how watered down/commodified it feels like queerness tends to be now. Was anyone else feeling that mourning really intensely today??

 Anyway, I know that we needed to make a fairly quick transition into break and discussion of our reading, but I personally was needing for there to be some kind of moment of silence or something so we could stop for a moment and just grieve together.

In that spirit, I wanted to share an exceptionally moving & beautiful performance piece by a trans dancer named Sean Dorsey – it’s also a really great example, in my opinion, of a presentation of queer utopian longing. Basically Dorsey choreographed the life story of a gay trans man named Lou Sullivan (back when it was like, realllly taboo for trans folks to be gay – mostly because in order to transition their doctors needed to feel certain they would be as ‘normal’ men & women as possible in their post-transition lives) who ended up dying of AIDS related illnesses. It deals a lot with queer longing and connection and the loss of history. You can watch the ten-minute excerpt here:

http://www.seandorseydance.com/video   (It’s the middle video in the second row, the “Sean Dorsey Dance: Lou - New 10-minute trailer”)

Anyway, thanks for letting me share all that… I love this class so much. I am, and will be, definitely thinking a lot about that interview if anyone else wants to talk more about it too!