Introduction: Queer Visual Historiographies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Homosexuality was later decriminalized in Scotland by the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act in 1980 and in Northern Ireland by the Homosexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order in 1982.

2 We would like to thank all our speakers for making the conference such a success: Laura Doan, Alice Friedman, Fay Brauer, Kristen Franseen, Christopher Breward, Dominic Janes, Jenna Allsopp, Jack Smurthwaite, Clare Barlow, Michael Hatt and Elizabeth Wilson; we also thank Lina Liederman-Molokotos for her invaluable conference assistance. Also we wish to thank the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for an Educational Programme Grant.

3 Accounts that have challenged this censoring include Cooper, The Sexual Perspective, Horne and Lewis Outlooks. Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, Saslow, Pictures and Passions, Smalls, Homosexuality in Art, Summers, The Queer Encyclopaedia of the Visual Arts and Reed, Art and Homosexuality. For exhibitions relevant to the period, see the New Art Gallery, Walsall, ‘Hidden Histories, 20th century male same sex lovers in the Visual Arts’, 14 May – 11 July 2004 curated by Michael Petry, the National Museum, Stockholm, ‘Queer; Desire, Power and Identity’, 24 June – 10 August 2008 curated by Patrik Streorn and Veronica Hejdelind, the National Portrait Gallery, London ‘Gay Icons’, 2 July – 18 October 2009, the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC/Smithsonian Institution, ‘Hide / Seek. Difference and Desire in American Portraiture’, curated by Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward, 2010, ‘A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk’, The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, 13 September 2013–4 January 2014 curated by Fred Dennis and Valerie Steele, and the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Schwules Museum, Berlin, ‘Homosexuality_ies’, 26 June – 1 December 2015.

4 See Taddeo, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity, 15–49; Brake, Print in Transition 1850–1910, Delaney, The Neo-Pagans. Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth, Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, Langer, Romaine Brooks, and Rault, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity.

5 The founding text of many queer approaches is Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet.

6 Butler, ‘Critically Queer’, 230.

7 Eng, Halberstam and Muñoz, ‘What’s Queer about Queer Studies now?’, 1.

8 These texts include Halberstam, Female Masculinity, and In a Queer Time and Place, and Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.

9 The main historical accounts of British homosexuality have focused on the metropolitan context, London in particular, and include Weeks, Coming Out, David, On Queer Street, Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914, Houlbrook, Queer London, and Avery and Graham, Sex, Time and Place. An exception to this is Kitchin’s ‘Sexing the City’. For lesbian histories, see Doan, Fashioning Sapphism and Doan and Garrity, Sapphic Modernities. For a comparative study of London, Berlin and Paris, see Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe. Berlin, London, Paris 1919–39.

10 For the mutual implications of sexuality and aesthetics, see Davis, Queer Beauty.

11 Of significance is the collaborative doctorate undertaken at Tate and Kings College London in 2016 by Eleanor Jones on ‘Beyond Bloomsbury: Queer/Race/Art’ which investigates intersections between ethnicity, queerness and desire in British art c. 1900–40.

12 See Cocks, Nameless Offences.

13 Foucault, History of Sexuality. Volume 2.

14 See Cruise, Love Revealed, 9.

15 The literature on the Wilde trial is enormous, and includes Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side, Sinfield, The Wilde Century and Foldy, Oscar Wilde, Deviance, Morality and Late Victorian Society. Also see the recent catalogue to the Petit Palais, Paris exhibition ‘Oscar Wilde, l’impertinent absolu’, 28 September 2016–15 January 2017, 200–30.

16 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 14–16.

17 See Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 121–5.

18 Doan, ‘“Woman’s Place Is the Home”. Conservative Sapphic Modernity’ in Doan and Garrity Sapphic Materialities.

19 See Showalter, A Literature of their Own.

20 See Rolley, ‘Love, Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole: Dress and the Pursuit of the Lesbian Couple’.

21 The political ramifications and methodological implications of looking for and recognizing ‘lesbian’ history as part of social history are discussed in Oram and Turnbull, The Lesbian History Sourcebook.

22 As anticipated by Esther Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman’ in Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey, Hidden From History; see also Doan and Prosser, Palatable Poison.

23 See the catalogue to the exhibition ‘Gluck’ at the Fine Art Society, London (6–28 February 2017) and the upcoming exhibition ‘Gluck: Art and Identity’ show at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery (18 November 2017 – 11 March 2018) curated by Martin Pel and Amy de la Haye with catalogue essays by Diana Souhami and Elizabeth Wilson.

24 See Cocks 2003, 121–54.

25 Grigson’s observation in his Recollections, 154.

26 Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford and Ivory, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style 1850–1930, 2

27 Marshall Hodgson coined the term ‘Islamicate’ for use in relation to cultural and social phenomena that ‘would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims’, see Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1, 59.

28 As framed by Said in Orientalism.

29 See for example, Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, 118–31.

30 Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism, xxi

31 See Melman, Women’s Orients, Lewis, Gendering Orientalism and Rethinking Orientalism; Roberts, Intimate Outsiders and Heffernan, Veiled Figures.

32 See Ockman, Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies, Lewis, ‘Sapphism and the Seraglio’ in DelPlato and Codell, Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures and Roberts, Istanbul Exchanges.

33 Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, and Ze’evi, Producing Desire.

34 On the erasure of non-binarized psychosexual subjectivities and their reclassification as pre-modern within nationalist narratives of nation and region, see Najmabadi and Ze’evi; on the contemporary Arabo-Islamic depiction of homoeroticism as a Persian vice within internal and regional Orientalisms, see Massad, Desiring Arabs.

35 Ivory, 2. See Davis, ‘Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750–1920’. For the difficulty in identifying lesbian inclinations during this period, see Cocks, ‘Historiographical Review’, 1211–27.

36 André Gide, The Immoralist (1902) quoted by Clarke, Virtuous Vice, 126.

37 See Clarke, Virtuous Vice, 135–6.

38 See Sox, Bachelors of Art and Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort, 131–60.

39 See Lanzoni, ‘Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery’, 330–54.

40 See Dellamora, Masculine Desire and Laurel Brake, Print in Transition 1850–1910, 110–80.

41 See Reed, ‘A Vogue that Dare Not Speak its Name’ and his ‘Design for [Queer] Living’.

42 On the role of the sports magazine forging aspirational masculinities in the transition to Egyptian independence, see Jacob, ‘Overcoming “Simply Being”, 658–76.

43 See Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean.

44 This topic was addressed in the conference by Alice Friedman, whose paper ‘Domesticity and its Discontents: Queer Paris and the Varieties of Lesbian Life’ informed this section. Friedman examined not only the well-known partnership and Paris home/studio of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, but the spaces and dynamics of other creative expatriates in France involved in non-monogamous relationship between women, including Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney; Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, and Violet Trefusis and Winnaretta Singer. See Friedman, ‘Queer Old Things’.

45 Friedman, ‘Queer Old Things’.

46 For Burra and Harlem, see Stephenson ‘New Ways of Modern Bohemia’. For an analysis of Harlem’s gay geographies, see Garber, ‘A Spectacle in Color’.

47 For New York, see Chauncey Jr., Gay New York. For San Francisco, see Kitchin’s ‘Sexing the City’, 210–12. For Jamaica, see Faulkner, ‘Homo-exoticism: John Minton in London and Jamaica, 1950–51’, 167–86.

48 It would be fascinating, as the research field develops, to discover whether those Westerners who did remark on the diminishing of homosocial cultures within local societies incorporated this into the prevalent frame of imperialist nostalgia. On imperialist nostalgia, see Rosaldo Culture and Truth.

49 See Orton, The Orton Diaries, 157–225.

50 This media portrayal ‘documenting’ three gay men’s promiscuous sex lives reached, arguably, its greatest mass exposure in Russell T. Davies’ Channel 4 television series set around Manchester’s gay village, Queer as Folk (1999). For queer cruising in London, see Turner, Backward Glances.

51 Mort, Capital Affairs, 222–9.

52 For Brighton, see Brighton Ourstory Project, Daring Hearts. Quote from Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, xix.

53 Jennings, ‘The Gateways Club and the Emergence of a Post-Second World war Lesbian subculture’, 206–25.

54 Cook, Queer Domesticities.

55 Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort, 10.

56 See Janes, Picturing the Closet, 175–7.

57 See Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, 5, 75–6, 180–2.

58 For a recent examination of queer London, see Avery and Graham, Sex, Time and Place.

59 Ken Russell, Scottish Painters, BBC Television October 1959 and available for viewing at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2hscrfQSYK2BrFvHXbNhW5b/the-two-roberts-love-paint-and-poverty accessed 11 August 2016. See Bristow, The Last Bohemians, 292–5.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reina Lewis

Reina Lewis is Artscom Centenary Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She is author of Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Duke University Press, 2015), Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (IB Tauris/Rutgers University Press 2004), and Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (Routledge 1996). She is editor of Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith (IB Tauris 2013), and with Zeynep Inankur and Mary Roberts, The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (Pera Musezi 2010), with Nancy Micklewright, Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A Critical Reader (IB Tauris 2006), with Sara Mills, Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press 2003), and, with Peter Horne, Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Visual Cultures (Routledge 1996). She is co-editor, with Shaun Cole, of the special issue of the Journal of Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, on ‘Seeing, Recording and Discussing LGBTQ Fashion and Style’, vol.3, no.2, (2016). Reina Lewis is also editor with Elizabeth Wilson of the book series ‘Dress Cultures’, and with Teresa Heffernan of the book series ‘Cultures in Dialogue’.

Andrew Stephenson

Andrew Stephenson teaches Art History and Visual Culture in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London. His research examines British artists’ approaches to artistic cosmopolitanism, gender fashioning and modernism. His publications include ‘Our Jolly Marin Wear’: the Queer Fashionability of the Sailor Uniform in Inter-war France and Britain’ in Shaun Cole and Reina Lewis, eds., ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ+) Fashion and Style’, special issue of Fashion, Style and Popular Culture (vol. 3, no. 2, 2016), ‘But the Coat is the Picture’: Issues of Masculine Fashioning, Politics and Sexual Identity in Portraiture in England c. 1890–1905ʹ in Justine de Young, ed., Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body 1775–1925, I.B. Taurus 2017 and ‘New Ways of Modern Bohemia’: Edward Burra in London, Paris, Marseilles and Harlem’, Tate Papers (2013). Stephenson’s research also examines the London art market and its exhibition practices. He has published ‘Painting and Sculpture of a Decade ’54–‘64’, in Art History (2012) and ‘Fashioning a Post-war Reputation: Henry Moore as a Civic Sculptor, c.1943–58’ (Tate Research 2015). Stephenson edited a special issue of Visual Culture in Britain on ‘Edwardian Art and its Legacies’ (2013) and contributed to the Tate Britain Queer British Art exhibition catalogue (2017).