A publication arising from an international conference on queer art at the University of Oldenburg.

The book Perverse Assemblages confidently reclaims the pejorative term “perverse” and asks how intermedial artistic practices, embedded in semiotic/material webs with complex historical relationships, serve to queer heteronormativity. Media and media apparatuses play a central role in efforts to promote the liberation and the visibility of queer, queer-feminist, and trans*-queer ways of life as well as in normalization processes. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage aids us in our investigation of the ways queer artistic and cultural artworks enable alternative forms of imagination. Particularly in their interactions with various media, how are cases of boundary-crossing and exchange processes between media configured as transgressions of binary gender norms? And to what extent does such art further queer politics of anti- and de-normalization? These essays, divided into four thematic sections—Trans*Media, Trans*Bodies; Queering and Decolonizing Art and Visual Culture; Queer Temporalities, Media, and Movement; and Queer Punk Politics—explore the critical and oppositional potential of selected artworks.

Language: English