Cruising the Past – workshop with Fiona Anderson & Laura Guy

13 August, 2017
– 13 August, 2017
11am – 5pm
LUX
Waterlow Park Centre

This one-day workshop explores cruising as a method for tracing the queer past and surviving in the present and future, drawing on Fiona Anderson and Laura Guy’s research into pre-HIV/AIDS queer social and sexual cultures, regeneration, and community building in the 1970s. Participants will be invited, collectively, to explore ways that queer archival material and artists’ moving image work might be cruised in turn in order to uncover forgotten histories and foreground queer communities in danger of being lost or obscured in the present. Through group discussion and film screenings, we will devise methods of sharing this material with each other through writing, performance, and site-specific activities.

This event is part of LUX’s summer long programme CRUISING GROUND. CRUISING GROUND brings together a range of perspectives and discourses on cruising. The programme engages with the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised private homosexual acts between two men over the age of twenty-one. A programme of screenings, workshops and events has been developed in collaboration with Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 649307.
Lunch will be provided.

Please only book a ticket if you are sure you can attend, due to limited availability.

Dr Fiona Anderson is Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University. At the moment, she is completing a book on the art and gay cruising scenes on New York’s derelict waterfront in the years immediately preceding the HIV/AIDS epidemic, looking most closely at the work of David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, and working on a new project on the culture and politics of the drug AZT.

Dr Laura Guy is based between Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art, where she works as a Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies. In 2017 she received her PhD from Manchester School of Art for a thesis titled ‘Manifestos: Aesthetics and politics in queer times’. She is currently working on a book that explores intersections between lesbian feminist politics and visual culture, particularly focusing on polemics, pornography, and graffiti.

Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV) explores LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) social and sexual cultures of the 1970s, and their significance for LGBTQ people across Europe now and in the future. CRUSEV reconstructs aspects of LGBTQ cultures and interactions from the 1970s, the decade before HIV/AIDS, to consider what this knowledge can contribute to queer politics and identity in Europe’s present and future.
The three-year research project is financed by the European funding agency HERA, under HERA’s ‘Uses of the Past’ theme.
https://www.crusev.ed.ac.uk

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