This thesis discusses the cultural contributions – artistic patronage, art theory, art satire - of four Ladies-in-Waiting employed at the early eighteenth-century century British court: Mary, Countess Cowper; Charlotte Clayton, Baroness Sundon; Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk; and Mary Hervey, Baroness Hervey of Ickworth. Through a close reading of archival manuscripts, published correspondences and art historical treatises, I explore the cultural milieu, historical legacy and historiographic reception of these individuals. I argue that their writing reveals fresh insight on the switch from Baroque to Rococo modes of portraiture in Britain, as it does critical attitudes to sex, religion and politics among aristocratic women. Through the use of satire, these courtiers comment on extramarital affairs, rape, homosexuality and divorce among their peer group. They also show an interest in issues of feminist education, literature, political and religious patronage, and contemporary news events, which they reference through allusions to painting, architecture, sculpture, engravings, ceramics, textiles and book illustrations. Many of the artists patronized by the court in this period were foreign-born, peripatetic, and stylistically unusual. Partly due to the transnational nature of these artist’s careers, and partly due to the reluctance of later historians to admit the extent of foreign socio-cultural influence, biased judgements about the quality of these émigré painters’ work continue to predominate in art historical scholarship. While little-studied themselves, these Ladies-in-waiting were at the center of political, social and cultural life in Britain. Their letters therefore have much of value in reclaiming, not only their own contributions to the development of British cultural life, but those of the French or Francophile émigré artists patronized at court. By studying the work of these artists and the lives of their patrons, I examine the intersection between biography and artistic practice at the early eighteenth-century British court. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2013-04-29 03:14:47.731

L’œuvre de Pierre Molinier (1900-1976) est profondément transgressive, autant par les procédés élaborés que par les thèmes investis. Le réseau d’influences nourrissant les expérimentations plastiques de l’artiste est com-plexe et nous verrons comment certains de ses points nodaux tel que le fétichisme sont métaphorisés au sein de ses techniques photographiques et picturales. Il s’agira également de comprendre pourquoi les images et les discours qu’elles produisent apparaissent aujourd’hui comme précurseurs d’une conception queer de l’identité, du corps et des sexualités. Par ailleurs, une telle recherche pose la question du regard porté sur ses œuvres et de la contextualisation de celui-ci. Nous avons eu recours à une méthodologie d’analyse similaire à celle employée par William F. Edmiston dans Sade Queer Theorist et reposant sur de réguliers retours aux œuvres et aux textes issus des notes et des correspondances de l’artiste. Nous avons choisi d’articuler notre thèse selon deux mouvements, similaires à ceux structurant le processus créatif de l’artiste. La première partie repose sur l’analyse d’une extension au-delà du corps de l’artiste. Masques et prothèses sont employés en tant qu’outils de modification corporelle et participent à l’expression d’une authenticité dans l’artifice. Les créa-tures que Molinier compose à partir de photographies de lui- même et de ses modèles traduisent le passage de la multiplicité à l’unité et donnent à voir des anatomies dissidentes. La seconde partie, répondant à la précédente, correspond à un mouvement de contraction. D’une part, son rapport à l’autre s’établit sur le mode de l’absorption, l’artiste conçoit le caractère ductile des corps et les emploie comme matériaux de création. D’autre part, les expérimentations autoérotiques occupent une place primordiale dans le paradigme molinien qui s’approprie le vocabulaire visuel du Bdsm. Chez Molinier, le corps se révèle dans une matérialité créatrice à partir de laquelle l’artiste- alchimiste donne naissance à des créatures hybrides, incarnant son idéal de fluidi-té de l’identité et des sexualités. Pierre Molinier vient perturber des systèmes binaires et normatifs tant dans ses pratiques autoérotiques que dans leur mode de représentation. Construisant un langage de l’intime et du corps, il en reconfigure la forme et les fonctions, alliant mascarade et transgression vers de nouvelles corpo-réités / Pierre Molinier's (1900-1976) art is fundamentally transgressive, regarding as much the process he elaborates as the topics he addresses. The artist's experiments are built on a complex network of influences, and we will explore how some of its nodal points - such as fetishism - are metaphorized in his photographic and pictorial techniques. This thesis deals with an understanding of how the images and the discourses they produce nowa-days appear to us as a proto-queer idea of identity, embodiment and sexualities. Furthermore, our research interrogates the perception of his works and their contextualization. Our analysis methodology is quite similar to the one that William F. Edmiston develops in Sade Queer Theorist, and is based on a deep look inside of the works and texts taken out of the artist's mail. Our thesis is articulated in two parts, looking alike the artist's creative process. The first part aims to develop the analysis of an outgrowth beyond the artist's body. Masks and prostheses are employed as body modification tools and participate in expressing a kind of authenticity in trickery. The creatures that Molinier builds based on his own photographs point out the path from multiplicity to unity and offer us to look at dissenting anatomies. The second part answers to the first and matches a movement of contraction. On the one side, the artist's relationship with the other is established on an absorp-tion mode, he understands the bodies ductile nature and uses them as creation materials. On the other side, auto- erotical experimentations take a firsthand place in the molinian paradigm, which reclaim the visual vo-cabulary of BDSM. In Molinier’s work, the body is shown as a creative materiality, on which the artist-alchemist builds in order to give birth to hybrid creatures, that embody his ideal of identity and sexualities fluidity. Pierre Molinier disrupts binaries and normativity, through both his auto-erotical practices and their mode of representation. Developing a language of the intimacy and the body, he redesigns their form and functions, combining masquerade and transgression, toward new embodiments

This essay explore the enabling in queer and in art. How do art and queer relate to each other? What can enabling look like, and howdoes queer reate to art and art to queer in the form of enabling? My research studies queer people who create art in diffrent ways. With Sara Ahmed´s queer phenomenology (2006) and "orientation" the essay analyzes the interviewees experiences of art and queer and the lifeworlds of these artists. The study shows that art can be a part of or create something new or different for queer bodies to orient themselves from and towards. The study also shows how art challenges the hegemonic notions of reality just as queer does. That the art and the artists own interpretations that this study analyzes ar not inhibited by the produces and constantly reproduced notions of what is possible.

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This thesis deals with the topic of contemporary Czech and Slovakian queer art scene. It describes the main theoreticians and curators that deal with this topic and their main contributions, both in the form of exhibitions and theoretical texts. This thesis analyses six fundamental group shows of queer art (three installments of the Transgeder Me Project, Coming Soon, Queer Stories and We Will Not Change Our Show) and it defines five main topics that feature in these shows. Those are: historical continuity and archives; trans* from various perspectives; identity categories and visibility; gender and sexual identity; marriage equality and rainbow families.

Dans un contexte de bouleversements sociaux et d’une profonde polarisation politique entre la gauche et la droite, les élections présidentielles de 2018 au Brésil ont confirmé une significative montée du conservatisme dans la société brésilienne. Cela a conduit l'extrême droite au pouvoir, dont la campagne électorale était basée sur un discours conservateur anti-LGBTQ. Par conséquent, des manifestations hostiles contre les minorités sexuelles ont gagné en importance autour des disputes politiques, notamment des manifestations conservatrices contre l'exposition d'art Queermuseu en 2017. Toutefois, cette situation révèle une certaine contradiction au Brésil, où la communauté LGBTQ est constamment opprimée par un conservatisme qui gagne en force, en même temps qu’elle bénéficie d'un certain nombre de droits et de protections. Ainsi, afin de comprendre les aspects de cette situation contradictoire et les mécanismes de ce conservatisme qui se développent au Brésil, cette étude propose une analyse des circonstances historiques et politiques qui ont mené aux hostilités contre cette exposition. D’ailleurs, une comparaison de l’affaire Queermuseu avec un cas similaire aux États-Unis en 2010, l'exposition HIDE/SEEK à la National Portrait Gallery, permet de comprendre comment des polémiques autour des normes morales peuvent être exploitées au profit des politiciens conservateurs. Ces analyses révèlent l’existence d’un conservatisme politique au Brésil étroitement lié à un pouvoir religieux qui agit de manière stratégique dans l’arène politique en quête du pouvoir, par le truchement des églises évangéliques, qui sont constamment en opposition aux demandes de la communauté LGBTQ. / In a context of social upheaval and deep political polarization between left and right, the 2018 presidential election in Brazil confirmed a significant increase of conservatism in Brazilian society that led to the rise of the far-right, whose political campaign was based on a conservative anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. As a result, hostile demonstrations against sexual minorities have gained prominence, including conservative protests against the Queermuseu, a queer art exhibition, in 2017. However, this situation reveals a certain contradiction in Brazil, where despite the constant oppression caused by the increase of conservatism, the LGBTQ community is granted a certain number of rights and protections in public policies. Thus, this study proposes an analysis of the political and historical circumstances that led to the hostility toward this exhibition as a means to better understand the aspects of this contradictory situation and the mechanisms of the variety of conservatism that has developed in Brazil. Moreover, a comparison between the polemics around the Queermuseu and a similar case that took place in the United States during the 2010 exhibition HIDE/SEEK, presented at the National Portrait Gallery, helps us understand how controversies around moral norms can be exploited to the benefit of conservative politicians. The information gathered reveals the existence in Brazil of a political conservatism that is closely linked to a religious current that, in a quest for power in the political arena, acts strategically through evangelical churches that constantly oppose the claims of the LGBTQ community.

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In this essay, two voices are heared, from two women: a certain artist Xena, who talks about her life and its dramas, interwoven with her own experiences from her diaries; and the voice of Maria, who analyzes Xena's life story and her art, diffracted through the prim of the history of 21stC art.  Art the outset, "President of Crimea. Constitution", announces its author as Xena-Maria; but it is not yet clear whether the author is one person or two, nor who they are. Is it Maria who writes here, or Xena, or both? Or are they one and the same person? But at the end of the story, which is told rather in a form of certain legends and fairy tales, Maria and Xena turn into one whole, and meaningfully put an ellipsis after the words "to be continued". This reception was specially intended by the artist Maria Kulikovska, author of this essay, in order to protect both herself and the reader from possible persecutions by migration services and goverment officials of various countries, especially Russia. Also, for her it is an opportunity to step aside and analyze her own life and art form a third person, about which, perhaps, a fictional character from her childhood talks - a sensible step for Maria Kulikovska. The step that her creative language conceptually continues is to replicate casts of her own body and establish them in different spaces and contexts. So she fairly confuses the viewer as to where is the truth, and where is fiction; where is herself, and where is her clone - only now, here, she has applied the same trick in her text. This essay tells a very personal story of the life of a human body, a migrant woman in forced relocation, displacements, alienation and persecutions for her views on life and the conduct of society, and for her moral values expressed throught architecture, sculpture, drawings, performances, actions and public statements. Through the prism of geopolitical upheavals, it tells the artist's own story: How her analysis of own body position and boundaries helped her overcome stigma regarding the body of a woman from Eastern Europe, and how art can save and redeem in an unending inner drama.