ABSTRACT
Queer aesthetics, as it is understood in critical parlance, should not necessarily be predicated upon the sexual identity of the artist; rather, being queer in art connotes the artist’s rebuttal of the apparently inviolable dominant power structures, notwithstanding the artist’s sexuality. It is worthwhile quoting one of Colin Self’s 2 tweets which aphoristically articulate the basic idea of being queer: ‘If you are not queer, you are not paying attention’. 3 In other words, one needs to be queer in order to cultivate a sensibility to see through what appears natural and even sacrosanct. To put differently, queerness should not be narrowly interpreted as subversion of received codes of gender performativity alone; queerness is also implicit in the disruption of status quo and negation of normativity which is often confused with the natural. Therefore, equating queer aesthetics to the sexuality of the artist is rather essentialist, to say the least.
