The Possibilities of
Queer Aesthetic(s)

Queer Aesthetics is the first interdisciplinary, free-access, and multimedia arts journal for artists, academics, designers, creatives, and cultural producers. For our seminal issue, we’re exploring the radical possibilities of queer aesthetics. To imagine these possibilities, we must first consider what queer aesthetic(s) are and what queer aesthetics can do. 

Queer aesthetics are the various styles, concepts, and practices created by and for queer-identified, marginalized, or otherwise “non-normative” artists, scholars, and creators. Similarly, we can consider queer aesthetics as a framework which insists upon the queering of collective philosophical and institutional and societal standards of beauty and taste. Queer aesthetic styles resist normative structures in the arts and are influenced by their markers of difference. These “markers” are politicized identificatory categories that resist the normative by challenging arts structures rooted in heteronormativity, patriarchy, whiteness, colonialism, citizenship, able-bodiedness, classicism, elitism, and other limiting, collective standards. In so being, the “queerness” of queer aesthetics is not always defined by sexual desire or gender non-conformity but by any situational rejections from the mainstream. 

Queer aesthetics are subjective in that they are regional, cultural, gendered, raced, classed, sexed, abled, and otherwise variant on intersectionality within our individual identities. To investigate these queer intersections across disciplines, mediums, and practices is to move towards a queer arts horizon– one which moves towards equitable representation in the arts while disidentifying from those artistic structures, values and practices which do not serve us. 

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For our first issue, QA asks: 

What are the possibilities of queer aesthetics (as an analytic framework, style, identificatory label or reading practice)? 

How can queer aesthetics orient marginalized artists and creatives towards futurity? 

What does a future oriented towards queer aesthetics look like? 

What does a queer aesthetic look like? 

What makes a queer aesthetic queer? 

How are these aesthetics shaped by our individual/collective experiences and our intersectional identities? 

How can queer aesthetics and queer interdisciplinary media studies orient towards equitable representations and social change in the arts and academia?  

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We pose these questions acknowledging that they are open-ended in their breadth and scope and highly relative. We call upon authors, artists, designers, educators, activists, creatives and academics to share space and investigate these possibilities. In so doing, we aim to unpack the flexibility of queer aesthetic(s) and collectively elaborate upon its generative framework and usages. Creators working within and between the following disciplines* in a research and/or creative capacity are encouraged to submit their work for the Fall Issue, attending to the theme (Possibilities of Queer Aesthetic(s)) and the questions indicated above. 

o   Ethnic/Cultural Studies

o   Disability Studies

o   Queer Studies

o   Sexuality Studies

o   Pornography Studies

o   Visual Culture Studies

o   Museum Studies

o   Race and Resistance Studies

o   Curation/Curatorial Practice

o   Art

o   Dance

o   Theatre

o   Creative Writing '

• scripts, plays, fiction, speeches, personal essays, etc.)  

o   Poetry

o   Film/Cinema

o   Music

*Each discipline includes the sub-fields of
History, Practice, Theory, and Criticism