It is frustrating to look at the synopses of various panels and want to go to all of them. There seem to be two to four panels for each time period.
I was wondering if anyone else would like to comment on the panels they have attended so those of us who did not get to attend that specific one could get a brief overview of the material.
For example, Friday afternoon at 2:45 to 3:45, I attended the Queer Art and Visual Culture panel by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer. The panel was based on the book the two co-authored that will be released as a coffee table book, I believe by Phaidon. Lord focused on early lesbian artists she labeled "The Scribblers" whose writings tended to overshadow their artworks, but still contributed to a new queer art history. Some of these artists were Djuna Barnes, Bertha Harris, and Valentine Penrose.
Meyer focused on the specific pieces of art including "Sex-Terms Mobile" and "Friend of Dorothy 1943" which was created in the mid 1980's. To this end, he spoke of conscious backdating artwork as an act of embracing nostalgia and the dichotomy of embraced and disavowed history. He also spoke of the artwork that was produced as a reaction to a series of defacements and slashings of gay themed books in the San Francisco Public Library. Instead of destroying the mutilated texts, artists took the remains and transformed them.
I also went to the 4:00-5:30 panel about Queering US History. All three speakers were candid that the subjects on which they were speaking were relatively new avenues of inquiry for them. For example, Kyla Schuller focused on the first generation of female doctors in the United States who were overwhelming single and in living arrangements with other women, but stated that it was a new subject within the context of her dissertation about sympathetic medicine and its effect on the proto-eugenics movements. She also pointed to the proliferation of "Boston marriages" and the fact that this generation of female doctors changed the assumption of what a woman's place in the public sphere could be. She focused specifically on the Blackwell sisters, Emily and Elizabeth--particularly their opinions on what femininity should become in a Lamarkian framework in which it was believed that any traits improved in a parent could pass to the offspring.
L. Chase Smith spoke of the San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition (1915-1916). Smith focused on this specific exposition, but did argue that expositions, world's fairs, and amusement parks helped create a mass market of cultural, racial, and sexual mores. This particular exposition is a great example of the dual action of embracing virtue and condemning licenciousness and vice while allowing for profiteering from the titillation of the public. Smith spoke of the daytrips planned to Tijuana and the rise of the vice industry there coupled with the clean-up of the vice districts in San Diego in anticipation of the fair. The two given examples were the Underground Chinatown and the Hawaiian Village pavilions. The Chinese exhibit was the only exhibit with wax figures rather than human beings. This coupled with the opium den atmosphere re-enforced predominant notions of Chinese immigrant centers being dens of iniquity. This exhibit allowed for a supposedly sanitized "slumming" trip for fair goers. Meanwhile, the Hawaiian Village had live female dancers who could represent the furthest edge of western expansionism and U.S. imperialism.
I found the last speaker, Jennifer Worley, the most interesting. Her subject matter was the streets as public space and the issues affecting specifically youth sex-workers on them. Worley's focus was on Vanguard, a group of gay and trans hustlers, that grew out of a radical church out reach program in San Francisco in the mid-1960's. Vanguard members took part in the Compton's Cafeteria Riot which pre-dated Stonewall and grew out of outrage over discrimination against drag queens and gay youths at the cafeteria. The group also organized a performance protest in which they swept the streets of the Tenderloin and thus literalized the Street Sweeps of the San Francisco police, but also called out those businessmen who hired them at night, but excoriated them by day. Worley also spoke of the magazine published by Vanguard which served as a unifying factor. The magazine featured the art and poetry of the members, but also asked for information from readers about the harassment they received from various establishments in the area. This allowed individual experiences to be tied into an institutional homophobia, but also helped coalesce a sense of self and group.
1 comment:
Hello Everyone,
I went to the panel on Friday called "Recent Scholarship on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy." I thought Michael Steinberger's presentation on "Wage and Employment Differences by Sexual Orientation" was interesting. He spoke about how lesbians go into highly male occupation like construction. Is that true? Lesbian couples living in the same household were more likely to work longer hours, have higher wages and less likely to have children. Furthermore, they practice division of labor in the household. That differs from heterosexual couples where the female takes on more household responsibilities than their male partners.
Sincerely,
Ann Chau
PS Feel free to reply. I don't know if his research took the race/ethnicity of lesbians into account.
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