Lecture series

Barthes, Queer Before Queer? A Journey Into Barthes’s Visual Culture

Beginning
25.06.2018
End
25.06.2018

Barthes’s homosexuality is a well-known fact, and recent biographies have shed light on this major part of his social life. How should the inaugural text of Mythologies (‘The World of Wrestling’) be re-read in light of the fact that he was going to wrestling matches with Michel Foucault in order to hook up? What can we learn from it, say, about masculinity, and signs of gay visual culture and desire in general? If we look closely at Barthes’s work, we discover a network of signs that echoes the system of the homosexual Proustian subtext, and notice that gay visual culture becomes clearer and always more prominent in Barthes’s works from the 1970s, especially in images. Thus, the images speak when words remain silent, in a conservative France where homosexuality is condemned by law until 1981. Images also allow us to revisit key Barthesian concepts, such as the neutral, which can be taken as a queer notion avant la lettre, with interesting connections to Susan Sontag’s influential concept of ‘camp’.

Magali Nachtergael is associate professor of 20th and 21st century French literature at Université Paris 13 as well as an art critic. She is the author of Barthes Contemporain (2015) and Les mythologies individuelles. Récit de soi et photographie au XXème siècle (2012). In 2015 she curated the exhibitions Lumières de Roland Barthes in Bordeaux and Orthez, and she co-curated the exhibition The Family of the Invisibles in Seoul in 2016. A specialist of the relations of art and literature, her works focus on the relations of text and image (photography, contemporary art, media) and on Roland Barthes.

In English

Organized by

Organized by Julie Gaillard and Francesco Giusti

The event, like all events at the ICI Berlin, is open to the public, free of charge. The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin. If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.

Source of description: Information from the provider

Fields of research

Gender Studies/Queer Studies, Literature and visual studies
Roland Barthes

Links

Institutions

ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry

Relations

Institutions

ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Date of publication: 12.12.2018
Last edited: 26.04.2019