Far from rereading art history by anachronistically applying to it the term “queer”, used positively in militant circles since the end of the 1980s, Pour une esthétique de l’émancipation seeks to show how the writing of art history has diminished the importance of artists’ political and affective commitments and rendered the social significance of their works inoperative. By imagining new friendships between artists of the past, Isabelle Alfonsi brings out a feminist and queer lineage for contemporary art. Twentieth-century artistic practices are thus placed in the context of activism in defence of homosexual rights and the formation of a radical feminist and anti-capitalist critique. Claude Cahun and Michel Journiac cross-reference the history of American minimalism, as seen through Lynda Benglis, Lucy Lippard and Yvonne Rainer. The wars of representation waged during the AIDS crisis are read through the prism of the works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, José E. Muñoz’s concept of disidentification and the cultural activism of the Boy/ Girl with Arms Akimbo group in San Francisco in the 1980s.

The text is accompanied by numerous illustrations, including reproductions of works by Michel Journiac, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, Lynda Benglis, Lucy Lippard, Robert Morris, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Akimbo. So many images whose circulation has sometimes been compromised by the predominance of a patriarchal and heterogeneous vision of art history.