ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network Event:
“Gender, Queerness, and Dissident Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century France”
Thursday 19 November 2026
1800 (CET) // 1700 (GMT) // 1800 (CET) // 1200 (EST) // 0900 (PST)
The nineteenth-century French visual field was shaped by persistent negotiations around gender, sexuality, social belonging, and artistic convention. This session brings together three papers that approach these questions from distinct perspectives, examining how artists, artworks, and artistic communities could challenge, negotiate, or expose the limits of normative categories. From the Saint-Simonian communities of Ménilmontant and By-Thomery to the public construction of Rosa Bonheur’s unconventional celebrity and the homosocial worlds represented in Renoir’s paintings, the presentations explore the ways in which gendered and sexual identities were articulated through aesthetic forms, social relations, and practices of looking. Together, they ask how queer and dissident aesthetics might offer new ways of understanding nineteenth-century French art, its institutions, and its competing models of belonging.
Participants:
Mal Meisels - “Ménilmontant and By-Thomery: Queer Aesthetics and the Pursuit of Citizenship on Two Saint-Simonian Communes (1830–1870)”
Mal Meisels’ dissertation examines how artists at Ménilmontant and By-Thomery, two communes linked through Saint-Simonian aesthetics, developed into queer sites of state belonging between 1830 and 1870. Their research argues that the Saint-Simonian pursuit of familial, universal, and imperial citizenship constituted a mirage of inclusion, incorporating some marginalized groups into the state apparatus while excluding others. Drawing on nineteenth-century queer aesthetics understood as a defiance of genre conventions in French visual culture, this paper considers the Saint-Simonian aesthetic principle of le verbe s’est fait chair. Existing on both a religious and aesthetic register, this principle called for the material embodiment of Saint-Simonian philosophy. Meisels explores how Saint-Simonian artists prioritized the fusion of dualistic forms—particularly feminine/masculine, flesh/spirit, and Occident/Orient—to create works that foregrounded queer and colonial transformations.
Mal Meisels is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at UCLA, specialising in nineteenth-century European art at the intersections of queer aesthetics, liberalism, and French colonialism in North Africa. Their dissertation focuses on the confluences and conflicts between queerness and state power at the French estate of By-Thomery. In 2025, they curated Queer Kin: Histories of Subversive Love at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Dr. Jennifer Thatcher - “Interviewing Rosa Bonheur”
How did it feel to be internationally famous in the second half of the nineteenth century: a source of pride or an unwelcome intrusion? The most successful woman artist in France during her lifetime, Rosa Bonheur was interviewed around a dozen times in French and American periodicals from 1858, when she was 36, to 1899, the year of her death at 77. In this paper, research-in-progress for a monograph on the Transatlantic origins of the artist interview, Dr. Thatcher will investigate the backstory to some of these interviews, including the reputation of interviewer and publication, and the fact that so many interviewers turned up uninvited. Were interviewers interested in Bonheur’s work as a world-renowned animalière; her rags-to-riches background as a self-taught artist from a humble family of artists; or her unconventional lifestyle in her isolated chateau, living with another woman among a menagerie of domestic and exotic animals?
Dr. Jennifer Thatcher is an art historian, critic and public programmes curator. She is the co-editor of Theorising the Artist Interview (Routledge, 2025) and is working on a monograph titled The Golden Age of the Artist Interview for British Academy Publishing. She is currently a British Academy-funded postdoctoral fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, researching the nineteenth-century history of the artist interview. She was co-curator of the 2023 Folkestone Book Festival; public programmes curator for the Folkestone Triennial (2014, 2017) and the Whitstable Biennale (2016). She publishes regularly as an art critic.
Anna E. Dobbins - “Queer Desire in the Work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir”
In her essay “Renoir’s Men: Constructing the Myth of the Natural” (1986), Linda Nochlin argues that Renoir represents men not merely as consumers of pleasure, but as instruments of it as well. Nochlin’s reading situates this pleasure within the realm of heterosexual enjoyment. This paper pushes that interpretation further by investigating the homosocial bonds between male figures across the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, proposing an alternative reading of desire within his paintings. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, the paper considers whether the apparent heterosexual rivalries between male subjects—as they compete for the attention of women—might also function as a socially acceptable disguise for homoerotic desire. Works including The Swing (1876) and Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) thus become sites for reconsidering the relationships between masculinity, homosociality, and queer desire.
Anna E. Dobbins is a doctoral candidate studying modern and contemporary art at the University of Florida. Her current research examines constructions of gender, sexuality, and eroticism in twentieth-century art, with an emphasis on women artists working in and around Surrealism. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Women Surrealists and the Marquis de Sade: Feminism, Sexuality, and Transgression in the Post-War Era,” investigates how women Surrealists in the post-war era turned to the Marquis de Sade as a liberating figure. Her research has been supported by the Yale LGBT Studies Research Fellowship, the Grinter Fellowship, the Rothman Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, the Charles T. Woods Grant, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Gainesville Branch Grant. Prior to starting her PhD, Anna received her BA in French and Art History from Auburn University and her MA in Art History from Georgia State University, which culminated in her thesis project “The Elles Series: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Unusual Approach to Prostitution.”