Bookshelf: Jongwoo Jeremy Kim

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim's Bookshelf (photograph © Jongwoo Jeremy Kim)
Jongwoo Jeremy Kim’s Bookshelf (photograph © Jongwoo Jeremy Kim)

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.

Leo Bersani, Thoughts on Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Whitney Davis, ed., Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (New York: Haworth Press, 1994)

Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)

Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000)

Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated and introduced by Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005)

Jennifer Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013)

Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)

Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002)

Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994)

Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)

Arthur B. Evans, Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity (London and Philadelphia: Associated University Presses and Art Alliance Press, 1997)

Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004)

Elizabeth Freeman, Times Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)

Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, eds. Francis Bacon. Exh. cat. (London: Tate Britain and Tate Publishing, 2008)

David J. Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)

Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012)

Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Exh, cat. (Washington, DC: National Portrait and Smithsonian Books, 2010)

Robert Langenfeld, ed. Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989)

Tirza True Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005)

Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, Art & Queer Culture (London: Phaidon Press, 2013)

José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009)

José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)

Tan Hoang Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)

Nicholas de Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)

Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994)

Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Brenda Richardson, A Robert Gober Lexicon. Exh. cat. (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl and Matthew Marks Gallery, 2005)

Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996)

Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child: Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)

Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Ann Temkin, ed., Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor. Essays by Hilton Als. Exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014)

Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (London: Reaktion Books, 1992)

Vischer, Theodora, Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations 1979–2007. Exh. cat. (Göttingen, Germany and Basel, Switzerland: Steidl with Schaulager, 2007)

Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1990)


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.