Toward a Queer Aesthetic Sensibility: Orientation, Disposition, and Desire

Abstract

This article explores the idea of a queer aesthetic sensibility and how it might provide ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling that help one better recognize the imminent potentialities that hide beneath the routine and expected rhythms of the everyday. Thinking alongside the work of Maxine Greene and Jose Esteban Muñoz, the article considers how aesthetic objects affirm one’s existence through the embodiment of gay desire, promoting imaginative action in the pursuit of new possibility. Such an orientation toward the aesthetic reveals an approach to educational practice that promises to promote the values of imagination, attentiveness, and possibility, rather than conformity, routine, and homogeneity, which are values essential to the survival of queer folks who must learn to find new possibilities for themselves and the world.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Aesthetic objects, in this article, are considered broadly. They are objects of sensory experience in that they are heard, seen, or imagined in sensory form. These include objects such as movies, books, advertisements, artworks, and fashion.

² By using the term queer folk, I seek to elevate the complicated gender and sexual politics that unfold in speaking on behalf of or about such a diverse population of peoples.

³ Queer desire is considered broadly as wants and needs existing outside the norms of sociocultural control. It involves one’s sexuality and gender, but also exceeds them to include any rejection of what might be considered “normal.”

⁴ Gay desire is considered here as explicitly located in same-sex desire.

⁵ See artists, such as Thomas Eakins, Zoe Leonard, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Catherine Opie, as well as scholars, such as Butler (1990, 1993), Doyle (2006), and Halberstam (1998).

⁶ For example, as in Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Having a Coke With You,” where the poet imagines his queer desires via the everyday object of the Coke bottle (Muñoz, 2009).