Queer Formalisms: Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy in Conversation

AbstractDavid Getsy: The context of a group of essays on sculpture, sexuality, and abstraction prompts me to start this conversation by talking about how we both write about the valence of sexuality in artworks and performances that would not, at first, seem to encourage it. While we've both written about explicit material too, I think a concern we share is how desire, the sexual, and the gendered operate beyond their straightforward depictions. We also both have a background in the study of the nineteenth century, in which discussions ofand evidence for desire and the sexual were heavily coded. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJennifer DoyleJennifer Doyle is professor of English and founding director of Queer Lab at the University of California, Riverside. She is the 2013–14 Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the Centre for Research in Transnational Art, Identity and Nation at the University of the Arts, London. Her books include Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006). She recently edited "The Athletic Issue"—a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2013) and is writing a book preliminarily tided The Athletic Turn.David J. GetsyDavid J. Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also chairs the editorial board of the College Art Association's journal The Art Bulletin. His books include Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (2010). Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (2004), and Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance. 1965–1975 (2012). A new book, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender, will be published by Yale University Press in 2015.