Where Have All The Lesbians Gone – Female Sexuality For The Male Gaze

This January we are launching a lecture series on queer art history entitled “What’s Missing!”. In this series, art historians and artists will highlight manifestations of queerness across different cultures and historical periods: from the Western Renaissance to Yugoslav art of the 1970s, to contemporary Black African art, and many others.

Where Have All The Lesbians Gone – Female Sexuality For The Male Gaze

Thursday, 22nd of January at 18:30

This January we are launching a lecture series on queer art history entitled “What’s Missing!”. In this series, art historians and artists will highlight manifestations of queerness across different cultures and historical periods: from the Western Renaissance to Yugoslav art of the 1970s, to contemporary Black African art, and many others.

The series opens with a lecture by the Vienna-based art historian Kero Fichter. Kero’s talk focuses on representations of female same-sex desire through a male gaze in the art of the Renaissance and the Baroque in Western Europe.

How visible was female same-sex sexuality in premodern art? While male couples have been firmly anchored in mythology and art since antiquity, there is no comparable female counterpart. Where women with women do appear, this often takes place in an ambivalent pictorial space between physical intimacy and sexual suggestion.

The lecture examines depictions of women sharing sexual moments. To a modern eye, these scenes can appear as early images of lesbian sexuality. Yet many of these works were created by men, raising the question of whether they truly depict female desire—or rather an erotic gaze intended for a male audience.

Gestures that today are read as clearly sexual can simultaneously carry allegorical meanings: fertility, motherhood, and prescribed female roles. Between aesthetic pleasure and symbolic charge, an ambivalence emerges that continues to shape these images to this day.

We aim to reread these objects as part of a long visual tradition in which female same-sex sexuality becomes visible, though mostly not from the perspective of women themselves.

🖼️ Lecture

📅 When? 22.01. at 18:30

📍 Where? QUEER MUSEUM VIENNA | Baumgartner Höhe 1, 1140 Wien

💬 Language: German

📩 No registration required

💶 Free admission, donations welcome

This event is supported by: