Enfilade

From INHA: 

Looking Queerly

Perspective : actualité en histoire de l’art, no. 2027 – 2

Guest edited by Ersy Contogouris and Nancy Thebaut

Proposals due by 15 June 2026; final drafts will be due by 1 December 2026

Pompeo Batoni, Peace and Justice, ca. 1745, oil on canvas, 120 × 90 cm (Montreal: Musée des Beaux-arts, 1979.21).

Over the last several decades, queer has emerged as one of the most generative, contested, and transformative terms in the humanities. Within art history, queer theory has challenged normative assumptions about identity, desire, authorship, temporality, and visual meaning, all the while exposing the discipline’s investments in heterosexuality, gender binaries, and teleological narratives of style and progress.

This issue seeks to highlight the diverse forms, aims, and methods of queer art histories today. How is ‘queer’ a useful mode of analysis for art historians, and how might it unsettle binaries, hierarchies, and disciplinary conventions, including the very ways that art history is written? We welcome contributions across historical periods and geographical contexts: what might it mean to queer ancient Egyptian paintings, a Mesoamerican codex, or eighteenth-century chinoiserie, for instance?

Queer can also be understood expansively and need not be limited to works explicitly addressing sexuality or gender. Indeed, we are especially interested in contributions that mobilize queer theory to rethink objects and archives not typically understood as queer. To read the history of art queerly, as this issue seeks to do, is not simply to trace the emergence of queer art since the late nineteenth century; it is to question the discipline at its core and to re-examine all images with renewed attention.

We also encourage submissions that address the tensions, limits, and exclusions within queer theory itself, including its intersections with race, colonialism, disability, class, and trans and nonbinary studies. Rather than treat ‘queer art history’ as singular and settled, we are interested in papers that actively grapple with the historiography of queer within our discipline as well as what it means to queer art history today.

Please send your proposals (a summary of 200–500 words / 2000–3000 characters, a working title, a short bibliography on the subject and a brief biography) to the editors (revue-perspective@inha.fr) by 15 June 2026. Proposals will be examined by the editorial board regardless of language (the translation of articles accepted for publication is handled by Perspective). The authors of the pre-selected projects will be informed of the editorial board’s decision in July 2026. The full articles must be received by 1 December 2026. The texts submitted (4000–7000 words / 25,000–45,000 characters, depending on the format chosen) will be accepted in final form after an anonymous peer-review process.

The full Call for Papers with a bibliography is available here»