CHARTING THE VOYAGE
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Queer Aesthetics visibilizes lived experiences as a form of expertise. Championing the artist and the author, we publish essays, articles and creative works together to position the creative and the scholarly as equitable contributions. Placing these works in dialogue, we open the doors to new areas of inquiry, valuing all mediums of expression and analysis that expand upon understandings of queerness and meaning-making in the arts. In so doing, this project roots itself in aesthetic philosophy, queer theorizing, intersectional feminism, and anti-colonial frameworks—serving as a desperately needed intervention to disrupt the exclusionary norms embedded within our institutions.
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Our publication centers works from outside the sexual or gendered mainstream, including artists whose race, class, disability, citizenship, or other identities affect their systemic exclusion from curricula, histories, and public space. QA questions the flawed and discriminatory reproductions of sanitized art histories, imposed censorships, and their relative frameworks of power— all of which have, and continue, to favor white heteropatriarchal productions. Critiquing the exclusions sustained at the crux of visual culture studies, sexuality studies, disability studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, and the fine arts, we prioritize works that challenge normative aesthetics and representations to consider strategies for change. QA fills the void at the intersections of these disciplines by addressing and mending the gaps between them.
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As we face another wave of pervasive legislation seeking to further erase
queer perspectives and lived experiences, we position this project as an alternative textual resource to diversify arts education. To accomplish such a task, it became imperative to challenge the traditional understandings of expertise. Whereas past journals have contributed to the devaluing of concepts sourced from outside the academy, QA resists gatekeeping structures historically disguised as “institutional standards.” Orienting towards queerness in our organizing structures, we have included secondary art educators, media librarians, working artists, professors, and graduate students as reviewers in our inaugural issue. QA is more than a periodical publication; it’s a grassroots effort to carve out space for queer creatives and academics and a call to challenge systems that do not serve them.

SETTING SAIL TOWARD THE HORIZON

Founded in the Bay area, the project began as a graduate thesis within the Sexuality Studies MA program at San Francisco State University. As it evolved from theoretical concerns, QA brought together fellow queer artists, educators, creatives, and academics to serve as editors for the first issue, outlining its mission, vision, and structure by the Spring of 2021. Together, Tina Coyne, Juan Carlos Rodgriguez Rivera, Marcel Pardo Ariz, Anaiis Cisco, and Son Kit imagined a new arts journal that prioritized queerness, intersectionality, interdisciplinary dialogues, and anti-elitism. Inspired by the scholarship of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, QA teamed with the CSUEA (California State University Entertainment Alliance) to launch an open call for submissions that explored the possibilities of art as they aligned with, or yearned for, the queer horizon. In this seminal issue, we feature twenty-six authors, artists, and creatives exploring the possibilities of queer aesthetics across mediums, disciplines, positionalities, and practices. Preserving the integrity and intent of our contributors, all artists and authors of creative works were asked to provide artist statements to accompany their submissions and speak on their own behalf.
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The printed edition of the journal contains more than 250 pages of original visual art, music, dance, performances, creative writing, and scholarship. Interacting between the dual platforms, the digital interface allows for greater exploration into the multimedia selections of issue 01, including access to audio files, visual performances, video works, and links to artists’ personal platforms.
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Our first issue features works that are united by shared modalities of refusal, resistance, and revelation in pursuit of the Munozian horizon. These realities are not linear in space or time, recognizing that our queer futures materialize between conceptualizations of our pasts. These works are tethered to individual experiences of a “then and there” which intertwine with our collective “here and now.”

The most exciting part of this project is that it is constantly evolving with perceptions of queerness and its subsequent cultural production. By way of its conception, this project will never be finalized because queer aesthetics will never be wholly or distinctly defined. The beauty of queerness is embodied by its fluidity. The queer, like the normative, is subject to change, endlessly producing new forms, functions, and applications. By rendering an iterative, multi-issue publication, we create the opportunity to evolve with art, artists, and academics in pursuit of the ever-shifting destination that is the queer horizon.
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This journey will forever be designated as the penultimate destination. Through the establishment of this seminal issue, we begin to chart a queer utopic domain defined by the limitlessness of our collective hopes, dreams, and desires. It is our belief that this voyage will be made by enacting queer aesthetics into practice. In doing so, we hope that this ship will be boarded by the very institutions which we’ve sought to challenge through adapting this body of work.

“Queerness is the thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness.”
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José Esteban Muñoz,
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Tina Coyne