Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings

The book will include contributions from speakers who participated in the Agender: Female and Transgendered Masculinities Conference (Leeds Art Gallery, June 2014) also speakers from the gallery's Queer Culture launch as part of LGBT History Month in February 2014. It focuses primarily on the development of queer cultures of art, dance, theatre and performance arts in Europe in the C20th, and will contextualise this in a wider history of gender. Most of the submissions focus explicitly on the gender binary and explore constructions of masculinity, femininity and issues relating to Transgender or Transsexual experience as mediated through the arts. It also contains a number of chapters pertaining to the work of artists Marlowe Moss and Claude Cahun - exhibited in the 'Parallel Lives' exhibition held at Leeds Art Gallery (April - Sept 2014), and the impetus for the original conference. There is a focus on galleries and the presence (or absence) of queer work in gallery practice and programming, and in the wider cultural canons of art history and performance. The book has been accepted for publication by Cambridge Scholars Publishing and is being co-authored / co-edited by Dr Nina Kane, Artistic Director, Cast-Off Drama and Jude Woods, Assistant Community Curator, Leeds Art Gallery as part of a three--year co-curatorial research project - Queer Eye (see www.castoffdrama.blogspot.com). It is provisionally scheduled for publication in Summer 2015.