Call for papers for the March 19, 2016 workshop:
Sexual Diversity in Visual Culture:
A Comparison between the Persianate, Indic and Latinate Spheres c. 1000- 1800
In world history, phases of the celebration of sexual diversity seem to alternate with phases of reticence or repression. While, around the turn of the first millennium C.E., the outer walls of temples at Khajurao in Central India openly celebrated the range of heterosexual practices (and one or two homosexual ones besides), the visual culture of Europe entered a more reticent phase, certainly when compared with antiquity. John Boswell famously connected the question of the rise of the repressive attitude to same-sex sexuality in medieval Europe with the question of social tolerance in general. And it has become something of a cliché in academic works and internet forums that before colonialism “Islamic” and “Hindu” societies or “civilisations” were very tolerant towards queer sexual relations and sexuality in general. Yet visual depictions of sexuality were often highly ambiguous in all the three cultural spheres that we would like to look at and moreover, the changing of attitudes through different periods has been much more intensely studied for the Latinate than for the other two (partly overlapping) spheres. Bringing together art historians and historians, we aim to look at visually expressed perspectives on sexual diversity as embedded in social practice.
By perspectives on sexual diversity we understand a range of things, which we might inexhaustively list as: a) views of what we today call queer sexuality, b) views on the range of heterosexual practices c) views of the sexuality of groups different from that of the observer and d) views of sexual practice as it crossed group boundaries. Often these perspectives intersected in complex ways, as is partly expressed in the dictum that goes back to the work of Edward Said: “exoticizing and eroticizing the Other.” We would like to delve deeper into these intersections, as well as into the values and value judgements expressed in visual perspectives, keeping in mind also the question of audience (which would, as Sussan Babaie points out, have been much broader for a mural than for a wine cup). Were particular acts depicted as transgressive or rather celebrated, or both? What can we say about those values and value judgements and what do they tell us in turn about the relative tolerance of the societies in which the images under discussion were created? Also, what can we say about the ambiguities in these visual expressions and what would those again tell us about the tolerance of ambiguity (Else Frenkel-Brunswik/Thomas Bauer) of the individuals that created them?
The workshop will be the last in the framework of the project research project “Handling Diversity: Medieval Europe and India in Comparison (13th-18th Centuries CE)” initiated by Thomas Ertl and funded by the WWTF (Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds). The workshop is convened by Gijs Kruijtzer.
The workshop will take place at Vienna University on March 19, 2016