Foto: Kunsthall Trondheim
The body presumes a relation to the human while moving outside of it, a fundamental material condition that holds onto the abstract immateriality of human rationality. Yet, some bodies matter more than others; some bodies are more human than others; some bodies speak while others cannot be heard. How can the body–represented as material, textual, metaphorical, or otherwise–offer the promise of politics?
Drawing from his research, writing, and curation on the question of raced, sexed, and gendered alterity, C.C. McKee will propose a number of art historical vignettes in which those bodies who did not “matter” will subvert, pervert, and assert their political agency materially. These are bodies who articulate their resistance as matter.
C.C. McKee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History, Northwestern University. McKee’s dissertation explores the visual ecology between representations of race and botany in the French Atlantic world during the long nineteenth century. Affiliated with interdisciplinary programs in Critical Theory and Gender and Sexuality Studies, McKee’s research is informed by psychoanalysis and affect theory from feminist, queer, and critical race perspectives. McKee has written on diverse aspects of contemporary Caribbean art and recently curated an exhibition of queer visual culture during the AIDS Crisis.