CHICAGO – Anna Robinson has been named the 2015-2016 Visiting Scholar at the Leather Archives & Museum. Anna Robinson recently completed the GEMMA Erasmus Mundus Masters Degree in Gender Studies at Utrecht University (Netherlands) and the Central European University (Hungary). She received her BA in History in 2011 from the University of Auckland (New Zealand). She currently lives and works in Budapest, Hungary.
Anna will use her time at the LA&M to research the US lesbian SM scene from the 1970s to the 1990s. This will be an expansion of the work she completed in her MA thesis, entitled “Passion, Politics, and ‘Politically Incorrect’ Sex: Towards a History of Lesbian Sadomasochism in the USA, 1975-1993” (2015). She is especially interested in looking at SM practioners and organizations outside of large cities.
Tara Burk, Ph.D. Honorable Mention 2015 – 2016
The Leather Archives & Museum has also granted an honorable mention in the 2015 – 2016 Visiting Scholar program year.
Tara Burk will be using her time at the LA&M to find and examine images and descriptions of fisting. Her goal is to create an exhibition that explores the iconography of fisting in US leather communities. This is part of a broader project that considers the formation of aesthetic, political, and sexual affinities between and among people on the LGBTQ spectrum.
Tara is a Philadelphia-based scholar who studies the art history of sexual subcultures. Her work has appeared in places such as Women’s Studies Quarterly and Journal of Curatorial Studies. She received her doctorate in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2015. She is currently a lecturer at Rutgers University, where she teaches a course on pornography and gender. Her most recent project is a Visual AIDS web gallery, which considers the (urban) street as both a site and a feeling of crucial significance to sexual outlaws (July 2015).
Leather Archives & Museum
