James H. Sanders

The Museum's Silent Sexual Performance

Abstract Museum curators, educators, and policy makers may have not considered their role(s) in the maintenance of heteronormativity or analyzed the ways that museum history, theory, and practice have constructed sexual norms. Recognizing queer subjects in the museum is an often difficult and uncomfortable task that requires grappling with multiple definitions of queer intelligibility, sustaining a relentless self-reflexivity, and a willingness to engage viewers in questioning assumptions, and contemplating the standpoints of innumerable imaginary others. This article discusses these issues and imagines the museum as an ethical, sexual, and sacred experience, where the creation of equitable distributions of power and authority can build a more democratic, compassionate, just, and equitable institution.

Dialogue on Queering Arts Education across the Americas.

This article constitutes a conversation between professionals of differing generations and nationalities: a North American tenured academic Baby Boomer born in 1951 and a vintage 1986 Millennial South American neophyte professor from Brazil. In this article, we merge our voices in pursuing a literature review and exploring pedagogical practices within arts education classrooms through visual culture studies. We discuss our approaches to introducing queer sexuality subjects within the classroom, define key concepts and terms, tease out our queer theoretical standpoints, and concretely illustrate how we have attempted to perform our queer theorizing through our pedagogical practices.

re)Imagining Gender

This profile of 21-year-old Columbus State University visual art student Briden Cole Schueren looks his art works, visual explorations, and experiences of transitioning genders.

Krystle Merrow: Representing LGBT Youth Narratives.

Krystle Merrow, a recent graduate of the Ohio State University, is a victim of the declining economy and is currently searching for opportunities in the photographic field. The photographic essay at the heart of this interview establishes a range of autobiographical narratives and coming out stories of LGBT youth in central Ohio. The interview situates the six-panel photographic suite, and explores the artists aims in its creation and representation.

Big Gay Church: Sermons to and for an Underserved Population in Art Education Settings

While the past decade shows dramatic progress in tolerance, acceptance, and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) people/rights in the United States, this population remains underserved. Statistics on LGBTQ youth suicide remain troublingly high; yet, when LGBTQ youth attend schools with Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), open faculty support, anti-bullying programs and policies, and LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, they fully integrate and avoid many of the stresses and negative safety/health consequences of homophobia (Kosciw, Greytak, Diaz, Bartkiewicz, Boesen, & Palmer, 2012, p. 6). An annual National Art Education Association Convention ensemble performance—Big Gay Church— examines the material, physical, psychological, and spiritual impact of Conservative, fundamentalist, anti-LGBTQ religious doctrine in creating and maintaining the underserved, marginalized status of the LGBTQ community in the US. Big Gay Church advocates and demonstrates the power of creative, collaborative, arts- and inquiry-based scholarship for interrogating discrimination and injustice, accepting agency, and imagining and enacting more equitable possibilities.

Casey Doyle: Artist at Play.

Casey Doyle, an art department graduate student at The Ohio State University has been “out” as a gay man for just over five years. Raised in a strict Catholic home, he notes that he “had known for a long time, but worked at not acknowledging it—going to church to the extent that the priest thought I must have had a calling. . . . I didn’t hear it.” In his honors undergraduate thesis from the New Mexico State University—Las Cruces Doyle describes how he views working through art to explore identity and social relations,

Finding Big Gay Church: An Academic Congregation Exploring LGBTQ Intersections with Religion, Art, and Education

Using the metaphor of mapping as an overarching metaphor, this article presents an amalgamated version of the first five years of Big Gay Church, an annual session at the National Art Education Association’s convention since 2009. Big Gay Church is a collaborative small group of queer art educators and allies coming together to explore the intersections of religion, education, the arts, culture, and LGBTQ identities. By using tools and constructs from dramatic inquiry and other performance pedagogies, as well as inviting attendees to fully participate as members of the congregation, we transform this conference session into an opportunity for scholarship, action, connection, and fellowship. Such arts-based academic interventions can provoke a re-imagining of ways forward, together, in education and research.

Moving Across the Margins: A Review of Stigma and Perseverance in the Lives of Boys Who Dance

Examining the first phase of a three-year study of adolescent boys engaged in preprofessional dance training, Doug Risners Stigma and Perseverance in the Lives of Boys Who Dance: An Empirical Study of Male Identities in Western Theatrical Dance Training broadly identifies the challenges facing male students pursuing dance education. His book aims to quantify the “stigma and perseverance” these youth face and qualify how dance instructors may (not) be reinforcing homophobic norms connected to the dance field and larger gendered assumptions of dance as an aesthetic/physical pursuit. Through survey, interview, and ethnographic research, a fairly rigorous review of the literature, and thorough intertextual analyses of these multiple data forms, Risner renders these (inadvertent) prohibitions constructing the marginality of preprofessional dance training of the adolescent male.

Interstitial Spaces: Visual Culture, Domesticity, and Metaphor.

Allison Buenger graduated from the Ohio State University with a bachelor of fine arts degree in ceramics in December 2009. Her works morph domestic objects into vessels of meaning, sculptures displayed in larger installations of textiles and found objects. Originally from Northeast Ohio, Allison resides in Columbus, Ohio, and works at Open Door Art Studio, a nonprofit studio providing art education services to adults with developmental disabilities. Allison actively exhibits her work and plans to pursue graduate studies in the future. She can be contacted at allisonbuenger@gmail.com.

Come out, Come out: Frameline Films' Holiday Havoc.

Five Frameline short films by and about LGBT youths coming-out narratives are reviewed by a professor and his (under)graduate university students studying visual culture and the socio/cinematic construction of (homo)sexualities. Respondents collectively found the group of films moving and well suited for viewing by middle- and high-school-age students.