COURSE DESCRIPTION
This praxis course examines the tension between art and that which is considered obscene: porn, public shamelessness, and deviant queer sexualities such as kink and sex work. By delegating the two as separate (often opposing) camps, we run the risk of further marginalization of a key component of a thriving humanity, sexual wellness. In an age of grindr, incels, shadowbanning, mass incarceration, and pandemia, we will investigate the role artists, activists, or accomplices play in documenting, destigmatizing, and expressing collective possibilities. We will develop projects that explore the powerful potential of the utopian imagination, intimacy, and somatic embodiment as tools of critical inquiry and discursive protest. The latter will be researched using techniques of GIF animation, self portraiture, and performance art. We will also read texts and view films that contextualize the politics of sexual freedom while considering the elusive yet paramount impact of art on culture. Students will complete creative visual art assignments, keep a journal of their own lived experiences of bodily autonomy, craft research-based projects, and present a final exhibition of their work.
Spring 2023 FINAL EXHIBITION
Not Safe for Socials: Imaging Sex Utopias and De-Censoring Obscenity
Opening Friday April 28 4:30-6:30pm
April 28 - May 12, 2023
VCAM Upper Create Space
Haverford College
Exhibition statement: Nobody talks about it, but everyone dreams of it: sexual liberation, expression, pleasure, and most importantly, existence. Navigating the ever-changing landscapes of human sexuality, we yearn to express, manifest, and fulfill our most ambitious constructions of a world where the human desire to connect lies unpoliced and free. Not Safe for Socials: Imaging Sex Utopias and De-Censoring Obscenity creates our own sex utopias with luscious imaginings of futuristic robots, personal documentation of daily details and queer fabulations of a fantastic past, present, and future.
We attempt to connect with the past, present, and future. We are not afraid to reuse and repurpose. We use sounds and images that we create and collect. We interact with technology that seems so distant from our physical selves.
The modern world as we know it has confined human sexuality into a limited space. We envision where this changes—not quietly, but loudly. This exhibit explores the beauty of sex, queerness, bodies of all sizes, transformation, pleasure, euphoria, and p[o]rn. Let’s turn the campus into a public sex utopia.”
Photos by Patrick Montero