Trannies, Amputees and Disco Queens: Blake and Contemporary Queer Art

Whittaker, Jason (2010) Trannies, Amputees and Disco Queens: Blake and Contemporary Queer Art. In: Queer Blake. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK, pp. 87-96. ISBN 978-0230218369

Abstract / Summary

This chapter in a collection of essays on Blake and homosexuality studies how Blake has been taken up by post-war artists, particularly with regard to queer theory and practice. This continues art historical work into the reception of Blake in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection as a whole brought together an innovative approach to the study of Blake, and this particular chapter was a detailed and rigorous critique both of Blake's use by gay artists and what the application of queer theory to his cultural reception means for the transformations of our appreciation of Blake. While the collection as a whole marked out the development of queer theory in terms of Blake studies (building on suggestions made by Christopher Z. Hobson in his 2000 book on Blake and Homosexuality), my own contribution explored the reception of Blake by a number of artists, such as Joel Peter Witkin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Derek Jarman and the Actionists, that not previously been considered by critics, whose discussions of the artistic reception of Blake has tended to concentrate on his contemporaries or, more recently, on late Victorian and early Modernist art. By exploring further boundaries for the contexts of Blake's reception, this paper was also an attempt to establish a perspective on the potential for queery theory in Blake studies that can move beyond the confines of contemporary historicist references.

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