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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
What does a better future look like? How do we imagine it? The future is an essential site for imagining within the queer community because the present is not a temporal space where members of the LQBTQ+ community can thrive. Analyzing conceptualizations of the now and the future in the work of current queer artists can give us a better picture of how queers are imagining the future in this moment, and how the queer community can continue to buck oppressions holding them back from envisioning the fullness of a queer future. The artistic works that this paper will examine are music videos created by and for queer artists, be steadwell, Rina Sayawama, and Dorian Electra. Contrasting these artists will illuminate the ways in which the LGBTQ+ community is imagining a queerer future and in what ways it falls short in this utopian exercise. This project does not ultimately seek to declare certain queer media texts “good” and others “bad” – that is a binary I am not interested in investing more time and words into. There is always something redeemable or interesting even in the most disparaging representations of queerness. Applying queer and feminist theorists like Muñoz, Edelman, Freeman, Berlant, Ahmed, Halberstam, and others, I will examine the ways in which their aesthetics are and are not attached to a queerer future.
tenuous temporal attachments: music videos and queer imaginings
What does a better future look like? How do we imagine it? The future is an essential site for imagining within the queer community because the present is not a temporal space where members of the LQBTQ+ community can thrive. Analyzing conceptualizations of the now and the future in the work of current queer artists can give us a better picture of how queers are imagining the future in this moment, and how the queer community can continue to buck oppressions holding them back from envisioning the fullness of a queer future. The artistic works that this paper will examine are music videos created by and for queer artists, be steadwell, Rina Sayawama, and Dorian Electra. Contrasting these artists will illuminate the ways in which the LGBTQ+ community is imagining a queerer future and in what ways it falls short in this utopian exercise. This project does not ultimately seek to declare certain queer media texts “good” and others “bad” – that is a binary I am not interested in investing more time and words into. There is always something redeemable or interesting even in the most disparaging representations of queerness. Applying queer and feminist theorists like Muñoz, Edelman, Freeman, Berlant, Ahmed, Halberstam, and others, I will examine the ways in which their aesthetics are and are not attached to a queerer future.
Bio
Katherine Hinders is a third-year Ph.D. student and graduate teaching assistant in the Film and Media Studies department at the University of Kansas. She earned her Master’s in Media Theory and Research from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in the summer of 2019. Her dissertation research is centered upon queer futurity and feminist praxis in narrative media.