Karl Whittington, "Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2025)
About this episode
Karl Whittington discusses his book on the role of desire in the creation of art in medieval Europe.
Karl Whittington joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025). What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art historians typically answer this question by referring to historical evidence about an artist's sexual identity or to particular kinds of imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter is mainstream? We know little about the identities and personalities of most premodern artists, but this should not hold us back from thinking about their embodied experience. In this book, Karl Whittington contends that we can "queer" the works of anonymous makers by thinking about their embodied experiences creating art. Considering issues of touch, pressure, and gesture across substances such as wood, stone, ivory, wax, cloth, paint, and metal, Whittington argues for an erotics of artisanal labor, in which the actions of hand, body, and breath interact in intimate ways with materials. Whittington takes seriously the agency of materials and technical processes, arguing that they necessarily placed the bodies of artists and artisans into physical…
People in this episode
Host: Jana Byars
Guest: Karl Whittington
Topics covered
- art history
- desire
- medieval Europe
- anonymous artists
- embodied experience
- erotics of artisanal labor
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Pennsylvania State University Press
Books & works: Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe
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