The queer body is incoherent and illegible. It eludes and exceeds any closet of epistemology. Queer body parts become autonomous, existing somewhere outside the known forms of the normative male or female sex—craftily questioning each sex’s memories and fictions. Rupturing anatomical structures of representation, semiotic difficulty between arousal and its physical signs characterizes the insolent flesh—and its history—as instantiated by Aubrey Beardsley, Jean Cocteau, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and Robert Gober.
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Jongwoo Jeremy Kim is associate professor of art history at the Hite Art Institute, the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Painted Men in Britain, 1868–1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities (Ashgate, 2012). He is currently working on an anthology entitled Queer Difficulty in Verse and Visual Culture (forthcoming from Routledge), which is co-edited with Christopher Reed; Professor Kim’s chapter treats Robert Gober.