Ashley Cope

"Beyond Binaries" reveals that queer and gender-nonconforming artists in the interwar period constructed non-binary gender possibilities through embodied and visual experiments. Artists Rose O’Neill, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Charles Demuth engaged formal strategies and motifs that blurred corporeal categorization and imagined an expanded field of gender in the context of the interwar period’s ongoing scientific categorization of bodies, public and private reorganization of acceptable gender roles and expressions, and consolidation of queer communities in Europe and the U.S. By examining the cultural influence of sexology and utilizing trans studies as a framework, this dissertation addresses historical and methodological gaps in the history of American art prior to World War II.