About Us
We are a group of students at Middlebury College creating this art portfolio inspired by and for Queer Critique. Our work touches on notable queer writers and theorists and we hope this project may translate, inspire, or teach something new about critical thinking through a queered lens. Through this intersectional exploration we hope to bring to light the complexity of gender, sex, power, and emotion.
Trans/Afro-Pessimism
Wenjin(Wendy) Wang
Digital painting
This piece portrays two figures, each with eyes closed and a single tear rolling down their cheek — one in the shape of the queer symbol, the other in the shape of the African continent, both tinted in pink. Taking away from C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides, the work aims to demonstrate the connection between Afro-pessimism and transness as both black and trans bodies are seen only as flesh in close proximity to death.
Queer Assemblage
Wenjin(Wendy) Wang
Digital collage
"Layered with cutouts of human figures of different race, age, and gender in motion walking around in a “Q” shape signaling “queer,” Queer Assemblage explores temporality, identity, and freedom through redefinition."
The piece creatively merges the literal meaning of “assemblage” with Jasbir K. Puar’s work “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages”’s definition of “assemblage” as a momentary, functional quasi-identity label that depends on particular situations, which is demonstrated through the collage of diverse human figure cutouts. The cutouts walk along the curve of the letter “Q,” seemingly trapped within the cyclical confines of the label “queer.” However, the dash of “Q” interrupts the circle, offering an avenue towards true freedom and escape embedded within the concept of “queer” that awaits discovery.
Selected visual elements sourced from nonscandinavia.com and thehomepagenetwork.com.
No Future Through the Child
Jayden Chen
Digital Painting
May Lee Edelman’s words echo in this piece. There is no future if we revere “the child”, for it is a false idol that has only been appropriated to marginalize sexual “others”. Even within the people the child supposedly stands for, it only oppresses and restricts. May reflection and thought come about to break the awe for a child that never was and perhaps consider Edelman’s solution: refuse to participate.
A Queer Utopia, One Flower at a Time
Jayden Chen
Paper media
These paper flowers are the part of a radical possibility for a queer utopia—a world where love is to be given freely, without condition or constraints. May each pale white flower serve to remind how everything is a blank slate and how meaning is meant to be held by the beholder, not dictated by tradition. Take a hand from José Esteban Muñoz’s work, and embrace a queer utopia that will never exist, for it serves as a guide to embrace selfless action.
The physical display is intended to empty. Whilst you may not be able to take a physical flower, I invite you to take a metaphorical one and continue this project by giving it to someone, whomever you may choose. Regardless of your choice, may you play with the idea that love is all encompassing and must not be selective to anyone.
Imagine a world where the bare minimum is not the ceiling, but the floor. A world where no one has to beg for bread or hurt upon the harmless. May the eventual empty vase not deject you for missing out, but serve as a reminder to refuse scarcity and carry the act forward on your own terms. Survival is not a privilege to be withheld, but a flower to be given, until every hand is full.
After all, everyone deserves flowers.
Elizabeth Forrest
Nightlife Drips, 2025
Ceramic
Manalansan expresses queer nightlight as,
“not just the opposite of daytime but rather a setting for the continuities and discontinuities of atmospheres, stories, and lives. In contrast to daytime, nights are often seen as realms of darkness, sinister secrets with hints of violence and evil” (Manalansan, 19).
This piece signifies dismantling nightlife as the deviant queer by creating a utopian equality that expresses daytime and nightlife seeping in to one another.
Functional pottery can move beyond the household to express ideas and make a statement.
Elizabeth Forrest
Reclaiming Flesh, 2025
Ceramic
Myths surrounding the racialized bodies were constructed as the lesbian as a gender invert and the colorline were being forged, this lead to such as the exaggeration of physical traits like large clitorises, feed into these structures of dominance,
“focused more intensely on the bodies of female ‘inverts’ than those of their male counterparts. Although the specific sites of anatomical inspection (hymen, clitoris, labia, vagina) differered” (Somerville, 253).
Reclaiming Flesh, (“flesh” a word in queer critique tokened by Snorton) to express our utopic world unconstrained with myths of how female genitalia looks.
Ivy Tan
The Burden of Heterosexuality, 2025
Papercut
Image of a woman tied with strings by mechanic hands, symbols of patriarchal control and heterosexual desire. This art piece refers to Jane Ward’s book The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. Heterosexual women are confined in a heterosexual culture, built by discourse.
"...being straight was largely beneficial for men, the same was not always true for women, for whom the institution of hetero- sexuality had been a site of violence, control, diminishment, and disappointment (Ward 2)."
Ivy Tan
Fracturing Discourse, 2025
This work reimagines the moment of escape from compulsory straightness. The central figure, cracked but not broken, runs from the hands of control, shaped by patriarchal, heteronormative, and capitalist discourse. Her fragmented body symbolizes the painful yet necessary rupture from predefined roles, as she flees towards a circle of women intertwined with nature, support, and mutual recognition. Here, she runs towards a queer utopia — a space for healing, intimacy, and reimagined relational possibilities beyond the "tragedy" that heterosexuality so often imposes on women.
The Exit Wound Was Mine
Scarlett Chen
I was told my body is a promise—
wrapped in silence, sealed in shame,
a ribboned gift,
meant to be earned with flowers,
a mortgage,
a man with clean shoes.
But this waiting room of girlhood—
with its pink cushions,
its locked windows,
its stale breath of patience—
makes me sick.
I watched the clock blink
between girl and woman,
heard the voices say:
“Be good. Be still.
Be wanted, not wanting.”
I was so tired.
Tired of the script,
of standing at the edge of myself,
waiting to be chosen
like a name from a hat
at a party I never asked to join.
Maybe it’s easier to be taken
than to decide.
Easier to be broken
than to offer the key.
My body is both prize and punishment.
Virgin or whore—
either way, they write the ending.
But no one took me.
I left the tower myself,
let the rain slip through my dress,
mud on my skin,
wind in my teeth—
and in that storm,
I finally learned
how to breathe.
"We begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society." —Audre Lorde
Somewhere, Not Here
Scarlett Chen
We walk—not toward what is,
but what might be.
Barefoot, against the grain of clocks,
where clocks cannot follow.
Somewhere, not here,
the sky forgets how to divide us.
Names slip like old threads.
Desire moves sideways, in loops and spirals,
We are fugitives, not chasing what is given,
but what lingers just beyond.
In the space between, I found refuge.
“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” (Muñoz 1)
Coal
Audre Lorde
I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.
Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—
And come whatever wills all chances
The stub remains
An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.
Love is a word another kind of open—
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth's inside
Take my word for jewel in your open light.
Bibliography
EDELMAN, LEE. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11hpkpp.
Manalansan IV, Martin F.. "3. ‘‘Out There’’: The Topography of Race and Desire in the Global City" In Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora edited by Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe, 62-88. New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822385172-005
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.
Snorton, C. R. (2017). Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt7dz
Somerville, S. (1994). Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5(2), 243–266.
Ward, Jane. "No One Is Born Gay or Straight: Here Are 5 Reasons Why." Social InQueery (blog), March 18, 2013. https://socialinqueery.com/2013/03/18/no-one-is-born-gay-or-straight-here-are-5-reasons-why/.
Credits:
Jayden Chen, Scarlett Chen, Elizabeth Forrest, Ivy Tan, Wendy Wang