Art Works by Richard Meyer; David Román

Art Works, Parts 1 and 2 address how art, theater, performance, film and visual culture have reshaped the terms of gender and sexuality and helped fashion a queer world. Scholars in art history, visual culture, theater and performance studies, and film and media studies approach art not as a reflection of history but as a creative response to it, and show how art and performance can themselves be a form of critical theory. The first issue includes a dossier on AIDS activist film and video and essays on late nineteenth-century male nudes, lesbian surrealism, homoerotic photography in the Deep South, and the transnational, transgender contexts of I Am My Own Wife. The second covers gay power graphics and psychedelia, female duets on the Broadway stage, Keith Haring and racial politics, British Vogue in the 1920s and lesbian-feminist magazines of the 1970s, closing with pieces on the Chicano drag street performer Cyclona, blogs and the Five Lesbian Brothers, and a work by Glenn Ligon about cruising and public space.