Publisher Description

Challenging many of the assumptions behind first-wave queer theory, If Memory Serves offers a new perspective on the emergence of contemporary queer culture from the suppression and repression of gay memory. Drawing on a rich archive of videos, films, television shows, novels, monuments, paintings, and sculptures created in the wake of the epidemic, the authors reveal a resistance among critics to valuing-even recognizing-the inscription of gay memory in art, literature, popular culture, and the built environment.

Author Biography

Ron Broglio is assistant professor of English and senior scholar of the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

Table of Contents

ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Staying on the Surface1. Meat Matters: Distance in Damien Hirst
2. Body of Thought: Immanence and Carolee Schneemann
3. Making Space for Animal Dwelling: Worlding with Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson
4. Contact Zones and Living Flesh: Touch after Olly and Suzi
5. A Minor Art: Becoming-Animal of Marcus Coates
Coda: Human, Animal, and Matthew BarneyNotes
Index

Review

"Surface Encounters is an insightful consideration of the problematics of animal phenomenology." —Kari Weil, Wesleyan University
"Learned and intellectually courageous, Surface Encounters brims with counter-intuitive arguments about what it means to tarry thoughtfully with non-human life. This is nothing less than a scholarly manifesto: compact, lively, and pressing, as much a rousing call for future imaginings as it is a sober analysis in its own right." —David Clark, McMaster University

Long Description

What it is like to be an animal? Ron Broglio wants to know from the inside, from underneath the fur and feathers. In examining this question, he bypasses the perspectives of biology or natural history to explore how one can construct an animal phenomenology, to think and feel as an animal other--or any other. Until now phenomenology has grappled with how humans are embedded in their world. According to philosophical tradition, animals do not practice the self-reflexive thought that provides humans with depth of being. Without human interiority, philosophers have believed, animals live on the surface of things. But, Broglio argues, the surface can be a site of productive engagement with the world of animals, and as such he turns to humans who work with surfaces: contemporary artists. Taking on the negative claim of animals living only on the surface and turning the premise into a positive set of possibilities for human-animal engagement, Broglio considers artists--including Damien Hirst, Carolee Schneemann, Olly and Suzi, and Marcus Coates--who take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms. In doing so, these artists develop languages of interspecies expression that both challenge philosophy and fashion new concepts for animal studies.

Review Quote

" Surface Encounters is an insightful consideration of the problematics of animal phenomenology." -Kari Weil, Wesleyan University

Details