Join notable academics, Professor Robert Aldrich, Dr. Monica Pearl and Dr. Ana Carden-Coyne, as they each present a fascinating lecture on a variety of queer history.
Panel: Professor Robert Aldrich (History Dept, University of Manchester); Dr Monica Pearl (English and American Studies, University of Manchester); Dr Ana Carden-Coyne (Centre for the Cultural History of War, University of Manchester).
Professor Robert Aldrich - Bodies of Colour
Throughout history and around the world, some men have always felt a burning passion for exotic companions, and their images end up in paintings, books and porn. But what about the eroticization of the locals by the locals? How do ‘bodies of colour’ appear when viewed through the lens of photographers who draw on both traditions from their own countries and the wider world, when indigenous sensibilities meet up with those from afar? Two examples illustrate such cultural encounters from the early twentieth century. One is a Sri Lankan photographer (and solicitor and pianist), Lionel Wendt; the other, a Japanese photographer (and friend of the legendary Yukio Mishima), Yato Tamotsu. Looking at men in loincloths and lungis, Japanese body-builders and Sri Lankan workers, we will discover how in a homoerotic view-finder the ‘twain of East and West did meet.
Robert Aldrich is Professor of European History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy and Colonialism and Culture, and editor of Gay Life and Culture: A World History. He is currently completing a book on Gay Lives in History.
Dr Monica Pearl - The Problem of Beauty in the Art of AIDS
From its inception as a health crisis, AIDS has been caught up in the demands of representation. But the art of AIDS, the visual representation of AIDS – particularly representations of individuals with AIDS – has been controversial, partially in regard to who is represented. And more profoundly, how their representation affects, benefits, or constrains people living with AIDS – their bodies or other aspects of their lives – and also, importantly, how their representation affects those for whom AIDS is nothing but representation. In this way, art that represents AIDS has always been seen as a kind of advertisement, carrying all the weight of pedagogy – that is, always accompanied by the question: how will this inform and affect the consumer of these artefacts – what will it tell them about AIDS that they should know? In my paper I will be discussing, in particular, the photograph, “Felix, June 5, 1994” by the Canadian photographer AA Bronson, which hung in the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in February 2003.
Monica Pearl is Lecturer in Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of Manchester. Her work addresses Aids and its written and visual representations, as well as twentieth century American self-representation in literature and visual media.
Dr Ana Carden-Coyne - Reconstructing the Body
Rehabilitating veterans and rebuilding masculinity in the civilian population were major concerns of governments, medical practitioners, physical educators and social reformers during and after WWI - in both Britain and Australia. Since the late nineteenth century, medical and social agents feared masculinity was in crisis. Men struggled with the gulf between Victorian ideals of military heroism and the unhinging effect of mass, industrial violence. Yet security was relocated in home life and intimate relations, which could be found at home or in safe male spaces, such as the gymnasium. Scholars see ambiguity in responses to war; men moved back and forth between escapism and domesticity. Some yearned for intimacy, others sexual reaffirmation – rebuilding the body into a virile spectacle. This paper explores the reconstruction of the male body in British and Australian networks of medicine, leisure, and consumer culture - but also in the way that artists and memorial designers reclaimed the body though the classical imagination after the war. This paper draws on queer theory and disability history to consider why different men found appeal in reimagining the classical body as whole and inviolate, both in rehabilitation circles and in artistic cultures. I argue that reconstruction reoriented men’s bodies towards practices of ‘therapeutic consumption’, entwining sexualized selfhood with the state, medicine, and civilian reintegration, and that artists and writers created a peaceful 'aesthetics of healing' to reconstruct the human body after violent conflict.
Ana Carden-Coyne is Co-Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War, University of Manchester, and co-founder, Disability History Group, UK/Europe. Her roles in DHG are Secretary and International Coordinator. She co-edited Cultures of the Abdomen: A History of Diet, Digestion and Fat in the Modern World (2005), and a special edition on disability history for the European Review of History (2007). Her monograph Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2009) will be launched in Sydney at the Queer Thinking day.
Chaired by Curator Craig Judd and book launched by renowned Australian author Drusilla Modjeska
