title: Reframing Romaine Brooks' heroic queer modernism.
abstract: Modernism was not a wholesale embracing of Greenberg's definition as abstracting, non-objective, and autonomous. The expatriate U.S. artist and lesbian Romaine Brooks politicized her portraits of females based on a queer combination of the Byronic erotic and Baudelaire's modern dandy. Her execution of her queer modernist aesthetics re-presents female heroes as part of a self-reflective dynamic of lesbian modernity that emphasizes the ambiguity of normative gender binaries and plays with style, personality, and impersonation as disrupting to bourgeoisie mores. My focus is on how Brooks shatters normative conventions of portraiture in her revolutionary critique of heteronormativity.
authors.affiliation: docnoir@hotmail.com
authors.forename: Cassandra L
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Langer
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D019513:Feminism; D049673:History, 20th Century; D018452:Homosexuality, Female / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans; D011173:Portraits as Topic / Q000266:history*; D012933:Social Identification; D013240:Stereotyping; D014481:United States