Karl Whittington, "Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2025)

Karl Whittington joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe (Pennsylvania State University Press,

2025). What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art

historians typically answer this question by referring to historical

evidence about an artist's sexual identity or to particular kinds of

imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter

is mainstream? We know little about the identities and personalities of

most premodern artists, but this should not hold us back from thinking

about their embodied experience. In this book, Karl Whittington contends

that we can "queer" the works of anonymous makers by thinking about

their embodied experiences creating art. Considering issues of touch,

pressure, and gesture across substances such as wood, stone, ivory, wax,

cloth, paint, and metal, Whittington argues for an erotics of artisanal