Transgender Studies and Art History: The Case of Abstraction

As part of his week as a visiting professor in the department of History of Art, David Getsy (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) will lead a discussion about the ways in which methods for Transgender Studies complicate and remap the ways in which scholars discuss visual information (especially representations of the human). In turn, we will ask what methods from art history can offer to this interdisciplinary field. Professor Getsy will begin by briefly introducing his 2015 book Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender, which is the first book in art history to substantively engage with the methods and priorities of Transgender Studies, and put forth abstraction as a prompt to non-binary thinking and recognition of gender’s already existing multiplicity and mutability.