Скачать или смотреть Remediating Pleasure(s) in the Queer Digital Archive by Baylee Woodley

The following video was submitted to our annual 2020 Humanities Graduate Student Association (HUGSA) at York University.

About the Humanities Graduate Student Association: The Humanities Graduate Student Association (HUGSA) is a student-run club that represents the Humanities Graduate Students. HUGSA aims to provide a space for our students to engage in discussions regarding topics within humanities and other disciplines. We also hope to help create a friendly social space for you to meet others in the program.

About the Speaker: Baylee Woodley is entering her second year as an MA student in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Victoria. She aims to contribute to the resilience of contemporary queer identity and community by destabalizing cis-heteronormative presumptions about the past that are used to justify marginalization in the present. Her MA work is focussed on collecting and remediating condemnatory premodern queer art histories and creating pleasure in the queer digital archive.

Baylee received her BA from the University of Victoria in 2018, and intends to complete her MA work by April 2021. Looking forward, she plans to pursue doctoral work and teach Art History, while also facilitating as many publically-accessible queer art initiatives as possible. When not pursuing the allusive premodern lesbian, Baylee enjoys running long distances, drinking wine with her family, and performing ‘draglesque’ in honour of all the historical heretics who paved the way.

Abstract: This paper is concerned with using digital technologies to take control of information interfaces from the past to further queer identity building in the present. From the 13th century, I will explore the French manuscript WLC.LM.6, Roman de Silence. The images of fluid gendered bodies, lesbianism, moral judgment, and social hierarchy in this codex can disrupt societal norms in playful and pleasurable ways. Firstly, I will locate the miniatures within the materiality of the manuscript and address their rhetorical function as elements of a historical condemnatory narrative. Secondly, I will explore the possibilities for remediating these condemnatory illuminations for contemporary queer audiences using the website “Queer Art History.” Queer Art History, a growing archive and accessible community resource for queer creatives, was created by Casey Hoke in 2017. I will analyze both interfaces – one traditionally located in manuscript studies, the other a digital platform – using the tools of Digital Humanities, intersectional material feminism, and queer theory. The medieval codex was one of the earliest information interfaces. Its design continues to inform our contemporary visual systems of knowledge production and visual rhetoric. Hoke’s website is a contemporary interface rhetorically designed to encourage people to locate themselves within queer visual culture and find pleasure in the queer archive. Digital interfaces offer opportunities to recontextualize art historical works. They allow for creating collections of otherwise fragmented, frequently erased premodern queer art histories. They can also remediate these works to serve the contemporary construction of queer identities based in collective memories.