Podcast 28: Austerity Ecology w/ Leigh Phillips
July 16, 2021
Science Fiction and Revolution: Interactive Conversation with Douglas Lain (In Venue and Online interactive Session – 24th August 2021)
August 3, 2021

Queer Bloomsbury: Interactive Conversation with Madelyn Detloff (In Venue and Online interactive Session – 10th August 2021)

Duncan Grant Painting https://www.artsandcollections.com/lost-erotic-drawings-by-painter-duncan-grant-found-under-a-bed/

 

Duncan Grant Painting

The Bloomsbury Group was a loose network of artists, writers, and intellectuals who lived, worked or studied in Bloomsbury in London. Comprised of Thoby Stephen, Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf,  Lytton Strechey, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Saxon Sydney-Turner, the Bloomsbury Group contributed greatly to 20th Century modernist aesthetics and culture. Not only was the Bloomsbury Group instrumental in the development of modernist art and ideas, but also in their experiments with gender and sexuality. In the introduction to their anthology Queer Bloomsbury, Helt and Detloff write, “the ‘queer’ of Queer Bloomsbury was ‘produced through embodied social practice’ that was dynamic and generative of new norms that members of the group took to the other spaces in which they lived and worked.” (Queer Bloomsbury p.3) These personal lives of the Bloomsbury Group were not quirky biological sidenotes, but rather “forms a core value of Bloomsbury life and culture. Sexual intimacy between friends of either gender was not only accepted, but understood as a rich source of intellectual, artistic and philosophical affinity among the group.” (p.3)
Refusing to separate Bloomsbury art and thought from the life of the Group, Queer Bloomsbury offers queer readings of writers like Virginia Woolf,  Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster; artist and designers like Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington; philosophers like G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein; and economists like John Maynard Keynes.  In this session we will be talking to Madelyn Detloff (Department of English, Miami University) about the relationship between queer theory and the Bloomsbury Group. Drawing upon her co-edited volume Queer Bloomsbury, and her other books such as The Value of Virginia Woolf, and The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century, we will explore themes of politics, modernism, radical art and literature, trauma, gender and sexuality.
This session will be run as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group’s fortnightly meetup. This session will take place both online via Zoom and in person at The Pipeline, Brighton, UK. Madelyn Detloff will be joining us online via Zoom, but we welcome interaction and engagement both both online and in venue. The Pipeline can be found on  6 Little East Street, Brighton BN1 1HT. Door for the event open 7pm with the online session starting 730pm. The in-person session will be subject to any new laws and restrictions regarding COVID-19. To register interest and be kept up to date with any alterations please message me at explodingappendix@gmail.com

The online session will take place via Zoom (https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81200659324?pwd=VVJhNmhFL2NmajVDVncrRGtFTEFYdz09). The meeting ID is 812 0065 9324.  The passcode is “214915“. This session will be run by Bradley Tuck and take place on the 10th August 2021 from 19:30 – 22:30 (BST UK time). If you have any questions please message me at explodingappendix@gmail.com
Follow the event on Facebook.