Queer Making

We know little about the identities and personalities of most premodern artists, but this should not hold us back from thinking about their embodied experience. In this book, Karl Whittington contends that we can “queer” the works of anonymous makers by thinking about their embodied experiences creating art. Considering issues of touch, pressure, and gesture across substances such as wood, stone, ivory, wax, cloth, paint, and metal, Whittington argues for an erotics of artisanal labor, in which the actions of hand, body, and breath interact in intimate ways with materials. Whittington takes seriously the agency of materials and technical processes, arguing that they necessarily placed the bodies of artists and artisans into physical situations and psychological states that can be read through the lens of desire.

Combining historical evidence with speculative description, this evocative set of essays broadens our understanding of the motivations and experiences of premodern artists. It will appeal to scholars and students of art history, medieval studies, gender studies, queer studies, and anthropology.

Karl Whittington is Professor of History of Art at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination and Trecento Pictoriality: Diagrammatic Painting in Late Medieval Italy.

Art History & Architecture

           European

           Medieval

           Art Theory & Criticism

Gender Studies

Medieval and Early Modern Studies

           Medieval Art and Architecture

           LGBTQ studies