Visual Arts through a Queer Lens (1800-2000)

The introduction to the monographic issue of Whatever presents a queer re-reading of visual arts in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean between 1800 and 2000. Drawing on both Feminist and Queer Theory, the issue proposes an alternative art historiography that foregrounds non-normative gender and sexual identities in Italian and Mediterranean artistic practices. The collected essays are organized in two sections: the first examines queer subjectivities before the then called LGBT movements, the second focuses on the political and artistic activism of the 1970s. The non-heteronormative male body emerges as the central site of negotiation, resistance, and identity reinvention across the entire period.