The Queer Commons

by Gavin Butt (Editor), Nadja Millner-Larsen (Editor)

The conventional idea of the commons—a resource managed by the community that uses it—might appear anachronistic as global capitalism attempts to privatize and commodify social life. Against these trends, contemporary queer energies have been directed toward commons-forming initiatives from activist provision of social services to the maintenance of networks around queer art, protest, public sex, and bar cultures that sustain queer lives otherwise marginalized by heteronormative society and mainstream LGBTQ politics. This issue forges a connection between the common and the queer, asking how the category “queer” might open up a discourse that has emerged as one of the most important challenges to contemporary neoliberalization at both the theoretical and practical level.

Contributors look to radical networks of care, sex, and activism present within diverse queer communities including HIV/AIDS organizing, the Wages for Housework movement, New York’s Clit Club community, and trans/queer collectives in San Francisco. The issue also includes a dossier of shorter contributions that offer speculative provocations about the radicalism of queer commonality across time and space, from Gezi Park uprisings in Turkey to future visions of collectivity outside of the internet.     

Contributors
Arlen Austin, Zach Blas, Gavin Butt, Beth Capper, Ashon Crawley, Amalle Dublon, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Christina Hanhardt, Diarmuid Hester, Nadja Millner-Larsen, José Esteban Muñoz, Cenk Ozbay, Evren Savci, Eric Stanley

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT

140 pages, Paperback

Published September 12, 2018

About the author

Trained as a fine artist and art historian, Gavin is a writer, curator and filmmaker.

Across his diverse output, he is interested in how the social worlds and aesthetic preoccupations of visual artists can be connected, sometimes in surprising ways, to those within popular music, queer culture and performance.

Gavin has written widely on queer art and culture, showing how LGBTQ+ artists have challenged us to think again about how aesthetic judgements are routinely linked to social ones. He has published essays on artists and performers Oreet Ashery, Joe Brainard, Mel Brimfield, Shirley Clarke, Samuel R. Delany, David Hoyle, Kiki and Herb, Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol and others.

He often works collaboratively with other authors and artists on creative projects too, including as co-director of feature film This Is Not a Dream. With writer and curator Heike Roms, he is currently exploring the civic importance of experimental art and education through a new exhibition project Live Class: Performance and the Art School.

Gavin has held academic posts as Professor of Visual Cultures and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle.