Anne Marie Butler, Ph.D. candidate in Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, “The Matter of the Body: Queer Considerations of Contemporary Tunisian Women’s Art”

Abstract: This talk analyses contemporary artworks by four living Tunisian women artists, arguing that the artworks challenge the Tunisian state’s reliance upon nuclear family structure, typical gender roles, and heteropatriarchy as methods of hierarchical organization for citizens. In my research, I ask how social norms can be dictated by the state, and evaluate how disrupting hierarchical categories, particularly those concerning bodies, might illuminate the relationships between the Tunisian state, Tunisian society, and contemporary art. I argue that in Tunisia, the state and the extra-state dominate bodies by cultivating those that ‘behave’ or can be normalized and casting out those that are not able to be brought into normalcy. Yet, these artworks avoid direct critiques of the Tunisian state and instead, confound the organization and subsequent domination of bodies by the state, preventing the cooptation of these bodies. Ymene Chetouane, Aicha Filali, Houda Ghorbel, and Aicha Snoussi depict bodies –human and otherwise– that provide queer alternatives to authoritarian expectations of how material comes to mean and to be categorized in the social world.