No "Gestures of return"? : querying queer aesthetics in North American art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Queer art holds a troubled, and troubling, position in art and aesthetic discourse. The task of defining an authoritative queer aesthetics is complicated by the nature of queer theory, a framework liable to shifts in definition, and founded on a commitment to sociohistorical, sexual, and gender transgression. The range of artworks considered queer is both broad and ahistorical. Certain exhibitions have taken on the task of surveying or representing queer art; using different categorical guidelines, they have naturally achieved very different results. The thesis wants to 'out' the queer aesthetic dilemma by asking how the radically pliant, uncontainable nature of queer theory can be represented in queer art? Four queer artists--Kim Kielhofner, Robert Rauschenberg, Emily Roysdon, and David Wojnarowicz--and one queer arts community--Toronto's present-day Queen Street West arts community--are considered. Their production is evaluated in terms of its contributions to a theory of queer aesthetics based on divergence, or, as queer theorist Sara Ahmed puts it, "fail[ure] to make ... gestures of return." Identifying strategies of relationality, intergenerational transmission, cultural coding, alternative autobiography, and queer world-making as notable aspects of queer cultural production, this thesis shows how queer artists both resist and appropriate cultural hegemony in order to preserve queer legacies. It is through this engagement and disassociation that queer art and queer aesthetics come to be defined.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".