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Part of the acclaimed series of anthologies which document major themes and ideas in contemporary art. The first anthology to assemble the key artists' writings which have influenced and catalysed contemporary queer artistic practice.

"Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender's mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists--Dan Flavin (1933-1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927-2011), and David Smith (1906-1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender's multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field. "--

Abstract
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies," revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

The recent exercise works of the performance and social media artist Amber Hawk Swanson explore extreme fitness as an allegory for self-realization. Her exaggerated engagement with such activities as CrossFit compels Hawk Swanson to treat herself as her own object to be both cultivated and punished, and her works expose the slippery relations between self-admiration and same-sex desire that underwrite the pursuit of normative bodily ideals. These performances are placed in the context of Hawk Swanson's earlier investigations of conflicted self-objectification — in particular, her multiyear Amber Doll Project (2006 – 8) in which she daily collaborated with a life-size sex doll (a RealDoll) made in her own image. Hawk Swanson often stages her work for social media, and she has an online presence that has received millions of viewers. With this practice, she exposes herself to online forums that play out the enforcements of normativity in the generation of both ruthless anonymous comments and impassioned defenses. Such comments about gender, bodies, and sexualities were the catalyst for the exercise works and are incorporated into their defiant performances of self-realization.