Working title:  

Queer Monumentality: A interrogation into the material embodiment of loss as a queer methodology in artistic research and production. 

Draft Objectives 

This thesis aims to develop queer monumentality as a methodology, emerging from the threshold between how to memorialise the losses of the Covid-19 pandemic and the recent reassessment and critical understanding of the relevance of monuments. Queer monumentality as a term has been previously used by queer cultural theorist Thomas Dunn and geographer Martin Zebracki to discuss the lack of monuments dedicated to the LGBTQ community. Both Dunn ​(2016)​ and Zebracki ​(2017)​ use queer monumentality as a tool to argue for the creation of new monuments to fill the historic erasure and disregard of LGBTQ lives. My adaptation of queer monumentality differs radically. Rather than repeating the same language of monumentality to address this lapse, my aim is to examine the materiality of the monument through a queer lens. I am using the definition of queer in this context as an epistemological frame encoded in the actual materiality of an artwork. This thesis will take a critical approach to the hegemonic regimes of remembrance and will raise questions about how queer methodologies can disrupt the traditional constructs of identity and representation used in memorial conception and production.  

My intention is to embed activism and change making into queer monumentality, alongside a statement of its position as a critique and expansion of monument culture. I will analyse the potential of queer monumentality to provide a methodology for approaching the contemporary cultural audit of existing monuments. 

Thesis statement  

Queer monumentality critically examines existing and historical memorial discourses through practice-based research to develop a queer methodology that can radically critique and evolve memorialisation both conceptually and materially. 

Research questions 

1. In what ways might queer monumentality be seen as a conceptual and material methodology that expands existing memorial discourses, through investigating the entanglement of memory work, art practice, queer theory and continental philosophy? 
2. In developing an art practice, to what extent and in what ways might we witness the materiality of queer monumentality?
3. How will the development queer monumentality in both theory and practice inform a critical enquiry that (re)addresses the existing memorial archive?