PURCHASE THE BOOK FROM VERNON PRESS HERE!

In recent decades, there have been many important and rigorous critiques of the so-called Western canon of art history, art historical methods, and pedagogies, precipitating growing approaches to correct Western art historical traditions’ outmoded, essentialist, colonialist impulses. Visual Studies programs and attendant methodologies, intersectional feminist theory, post-colonial perspectives, critical race theory, trans interventions, queer methodologies, and more have been instrumental in problematizing, revising, and rejecting problematic art historical methods. One central problem with the Western art historical canon is that it projects the false sense of some pinnacle of esteemed artists, a fixed set of timeless aesthetic perfections implying impartial excellence without explaining why or how those artists were anointed as ‘canon worthy.’ The canon also proposes a false sense of linear evolution, with Euro-American perspectives, artists, and discourses as central. Beyond the political and social problems of this type of Eurocentric, colonialist, heteropatriarchal, cissupremacist, elitist ideology, this framing is simply inept at attending to the complexity of global art and visual culture. This chapter investigates queering as an active means of intentionally critiquing and jettisoning outmoded and problematic methods, frameworks, and ideologies to queer art history as a productive means of decolonizing approaches to art and visual culture.