Tag: Intersectional Feminism

Six "Blackout" panels are lined up with three on top and three on the bottom against a white background. All the panels are black and white with digitized textile samples over top of clips of text.
Blackout

Blackout

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Blackout
Artist: Indira Allegra
Date & Location: 2015, Digital
Media: Digital Weaving Installation, Dimensions Variable

Significance to Queer Art History

In Indira Allegra’s online portfolio this work is described as:

… a large scale video text/ile installation studying the weave structure of police uniforms alongside statements made by families of those lost to police violence including: Aiyana Stanley-Jones (7), Tamir Rice (12), John Crawford III (22), Amadou Diallo (23), Tarika Wilson (26), Eric Garner (43), Yvette Smith (45), and Eleanor Bumpurs (66). In six black and white panels, these grief stricken texts scroll and scan endlessly, struggling to articulate themselves through the presence of serge twill – the fabric used to manufacture police uniforms across the nation.

https://www.indiraallegra.com/blackout

Queer activism and art history cannot be anything but intersectional — if they are not intersectional, they will only serve to reinforce the fabric of systemic oppression and violence. Be queer, and be proud, and if you’re a white queer (as I am) be active about using your white privilege to dismantle the systems and cultural narratives that created it.

The realities of systemic racial violence demand both an immediate response, and deeper longterm changes. Racism needs to be dismantled by our performances, by our dinner conversations, by our curricula, by our websites, by our canvases.

To all of the BIPOC queer folx who visit this website, thank you for checking out this digital collection, and I would like to centre your voices here. If you have feedback and/or art work you would like to see featured please reach me at: queerarthistoryqah@gmail.com

Hear Indira Allegra discuss “Blackout” in her own words
Saint Wilgefortis shown on the cross with a beard, a crown, and a light blue dress with a fiddler at her feet. There is a column of text to the left of the image.
Saint Wilgefortis

Saint Wilgefortis

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It is my sincere pleasure to introduce you — my sparkly, queer, and quarantined friends — to my favourite medieval Catholic saint.

Saint Wilgefortis shown on the cross with a beard, a crown, and a light blue dress with a fiddler at her feet. There is a column of text to the left of the image.

Date & Location: 1678, (currently) Städtisches Museum, Braunschweig, Germany

Artist: Unknown

Media: I believe it is pigments and ink on a wooden panel, but I will keep investigating! I wanted to get her name out to you all even while awaiting the reopening of libraries.

Significance to Queer Art History:

Saint Wilgefortis (or Saint Kümmernis) was martyred on a cross — the same martyrdom as Christ. According to her hagiography (the formal term for stories of Saint’s lives), she was being forced into marriage by her father, but wished to remain a virgin married only to God. She prayed to God to save her from her fate. He responded to her prayers by giving her masculine features, such as a beard, so that no one would want to marry her (perhaps the medieval version of finding freedom through the defiance of cis- het- standards)! Her father sentenced her to death for her disobedience and had her crucified.

Since she has a beard and died on a cross, images of the gender-bending Saint Wilgefortis are often easily mistaken for images of Christ. Some distinguishing features are: her missing shoe on the right foot, a fiddler, and sometimes a gown.

Saint Wilgefortis is a valuable component of the web of intersectional queer and feminist art “hirstories.” She is commonly seen as the Patron Saint of Abused Women, and she makes us question premodern/medieval constructions of gender and sexuality. Transformation between binary genders, as well as non-binary characters like Saint Wilgefortis herself, abound in the medieval imagination from biblical narratives to courtly romances.

The Vatican also removed her Feast Day from the Catholic calendar in 1969, and so her story continues in the discourse of trans- and homophobic exclusion, the resilience queer cultural memory, and contemporary art activism.

German image of St Wilgefortis. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Resources:

Friesen, Ilse E. The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis since the Middle Ages. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001.