Queer Making

What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art historians typically answer this question by referring to historical evidence about an artist’s sexual identity or to particular kinds of imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter is mainstream?

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.

“This provocative and pioneering book sets out to explore the capacity of artistic making to engender queer experiences and desires. While to date scholarship on queerness in medieval art has mainly been taken up with issues of identity and iconography, Whittington shifts our attention to materials and techniques, seeing these as being themselves sites of physical intimacy, desire, and (homo)eroticism.”—Robert Mills, author of Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages

“In this speculative, creative, and evocative work, Whittington brings together queer studies and materiality studies to explore the feelings of desire a maker may have experienced while creating material things. By vividly imagining scenarios of creation that put artists into close contact with their materials and the bodies they formed, Whittington creates a vivid picture of medieval artists as human beings who had physical and emotional intimacy with their creations.”—Nancy Thompson, coauthor of Medieval Art 250–1450: Matter, Making, and Meaning

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