HANNAH QUINLAN & ROSIE HASTINGS / Gay Betrayals

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings 
Gay Betrayals  2020
Softcover, 102 pages. 21 x 15cm
Afterall Books

Condition: New

Bersani’s intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability. Building on artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani’s polemic. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality emerges.In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, pioneering queer theorist Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made 'gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining'. Leo Bersani (1931–2022) was an American theorist best known for his books 'Is the Rectum a Grave?', 'Homos' and 'Receptive Bodies'. Born in the Bronx, he graduated from Harvard in 1952 and eventually joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he became an influential teacher, remaining there for the rest of his career.