Minor Aesthetics Working Group

The Minor Aesthetics Working Group creates a space of provocation. We begin with the premise that artistic interventions via the sonic, visual, and tactile hold potential for deeper attention to the unseen, inaudible, disavowed registers of racialized queer life.

Throughout 2022, we sought to forge an intellectual hub for invited artists and scholars from the humanities and interpretive social sciences working at the nexus between aesthetic inquiry, queer studies, and the Asian diaspora. We gathered in multiple venues— seminars, performances, a roundtable, an online exhibition—to experiment with how the aesthetic helps us to sense and reconfigure the dialectical tensions joining minoritarian life to historical and ontological violence.

Thinking with the affordances of different methodologies, the conveners call forth an aesthetics-as-ethics, a praxis of liberation from the vantage point of art. Insofar as Minor Aesthetics highlights innovations in style and poetics, we are ultimately invested in, on the one hand, sketching the corporeal ways of registering empire’s circumscription of minoritarian life, and on the other, illuminating performance’s potential to bust open precisely that imperial dislocation while heralding in More Life.

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Co-Conveners

Anna Storti
Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies

Yun Emily Wang
Music