‘Fallen Angel’: making a space for queer identities in schools

Abstract

This paper is an examination of an artwork produced by a sixth-form student who explores the prohibited spaces of queer lives. She does so through the production of an installation, a dominant format in contemporary art, in which space is a central semiotic vehicle. Rather than choosing a confessional strategy, she distances herself from her own emerging lesbian identity by imagining these spaces from the subject position of a young gay male. This process enables her to engage audiences in questioning the historical and social structures that reproduce heteronormativity without falling into the tropes of popular confession. With reference to the work of Judith Butler, I analyse how the student enacts and reconfigures representations of gender and sexuality to afford a space for the construction of queer identities.

Keywords:

• art education
• art installation
• queer theory
• semiotics
• sexuality

Notes

Batailles (2006 [1957]) argues that to transgress a taboo is not to oppose it so much as to complete it; in other words, a taboo can only be reinforced if there are attempts to break it.

The apostle claims in respect to the resurrection of the faithful on the day of judgement ‘For when they [seven brothers who serially marry the same spouse on their subsequent deaths] shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven’ (King James version).

A copy of the Book of Enoch (1913 [c.300BC]) was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Tertullian (160–230) defends it, in fact, uses it to inveigh against women and their use of adornment (http://www.piney.com/FathEnochTertu.html#P292_58954 accessed February 2, 2009) and even St. Augustine (354–430) mentions it in The City of God, Chapter 23, refuting the possibility of angels mating with humans, but not so ‘sylvans and fauns’ (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120115.htm accessed February 2, 2009).

Indeed according to Enoch the angels are banished after:

(12) … their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement and of their consummation, till the judgement that is (13) for ever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and (14) to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined for ever. And whosoever shall be condemned and destroyed will from thenceforth be bound together with them to the end of all (15) generation (Book of Enoch 1913 [c.300BC], chap. VI–XI).

The inevitability of this disposition in the male homosexual, that of the corrupter/seducer, has been much used to defend homophobia even eugenics: for extreme examples of these views [but not unrepresentative], see Kraepelin and Hoche in Mildenberger (2007) and Saxon (2007).