Conference Panel Organized & Refereed

“Queer Exhaustion”

College Art Association Annual Conference, 2016

Alpesh Kantilal Patel & Tina Takemoto, Co-chairs

From the call for papers:

This panel explores the pleasures and perils of employing exaggeration as an artistic strategy to combat stereotypes that cut across intersecting identifications of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and disability. Indeed, Judith Butler’s parodic mimicry, José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification, and Homi Bhabha’s colonial mimicry suggest the profound potential of parody to uncover the artifice of gendered, racial, and sexual identification. However, when do strategies of disidentification become a liability or risk reinforcing stereotypes that are under scrutiny? What is the long-term psychic impact of performing toxic representations and embodying one’s own racial and sexual abjection? When does queer failure lead to queer exhaustion?

This lunchtime queer caucus of art panel for CAA 2016 will bring together a range of contemporary artists as well as academics to begin to explore vital modes of unsettling deeply entrenched stereotypes as well as the emotional costs on the artists who use parody as mode of critique. In particular, this panel shifts its focus away from artistic intentionality and the creation of counterpublics toward an exploration of the affective relationship between the artwork, the performer, and the audience.