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Locating the Queer Gesture: Point and Line to Flesh

Title:

Locating the Queer Gesture: Point and Line to Flesh

DeFrias, Caroline (2024) Locating the Queer Gesture: Point and Line to Flesh. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

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Abstract

In this thesis, I seek to articulate queerness as an embodied politic and poetic of disorientation I call the gesture, which I locate within the works and my encounters with Agnes Martin, Marlow Moss, and Catherine Opie. Here, through both visual analysis, critical theory, embodied experience and its memory, I illuminate queer aspects and potentialities of encounters with works of art not through indicting the body of viewer (myself), the artists I discuss, nor the particular aesthetics of their works towards the production of a stable archive, but rather through the ephemeral and disorienting encounters of identification both found and challenged in the works of art I discuss. In my methodology, I seek to maintain a poetic posture of opacity and respect the refusal I locate in these works and in myself, as I engage auto theory. My thesis seeks to articulate queerness as a plurality of strategy and embodiment, through describing my experiences and analyses of the works of Agnes Martin, Marlow Moss, and Catherine Opie—three artists who mean a great deal to me, as a queer subject.

Divisions:Concordia University > Faculty of Fine Arts > Art History
Item Type:Thesis (Masters)
Authors:DeFrias, Caroline
Institution:Concordia University
Degree Name:M.A.
Program:Art History
Date:1 April 2024
Thesis Supervisor(s):Chew, May
Keywords:Queer, counter-archive, phenomenology, embodiment, embodied knowledge, situated knowledge, Agnes Martin, Marlow Moss, Catherine Opie
ID Code:993598
Deposited By: Caroline DeFrias
Deposited On:04 Jun 2024 14:08
Last Modified:04 Jun 2024 14:08

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