Bodies, memories, visibility: Élisabeth Lebovici’s digital reinscription of lesbians in the French visual arts

Citation

Johnston C (2025) Bodies, memories, visibility: Élisabeth Lebovici’s digital reinscription of lesbians in the French visual arts. In: Bouamer S, Provencher DM & Schroth RK (eds.) Queer Realms of Memory: Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781837644063

Abstract
French art historian, Elisabeth Lebovici, describes herself on her Twitter feed as ‘1/3 art + 1/3 queer + 1/3 both)’. Her interests span visual, aural and verbal art forms, approaching them from an intersectional perspective that simultaneously foregrounds the activist and the artistic, the postcolonial and the feminist, the lesbian and the queer. Her blog (le-beau-vice.blogspot.com) has been running since 2006 and is similarly wide-ranging in its gaze but there Lebovici operates at a different pace, more inclined to allow the detail of a queer landscape unfold, with a specific interest in reinscriptions of, and reflections on, the place of lesbian artists, activists and politics within that wider queer landscape. Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, her blogs have charted the territory of her ‘jours et nuits’, first ‘de confinements’, then ‘de déconfinements’ and, since June 2020, they have become ‘jours et nuits’ of everything from the male gaze to fragmentation, constituting a new queer realm of contemporary memory in the digital sphere. The first of the ‘jours et nuits de confinements’ posts was dedicated to Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman and, long before mainstream news outlets began to ponder whether there might be differences in our experiences of the pandemic that are inflected by gender, class, age, ethnicity…, Lebovici considered Akerman’s representation of women indoors that is a far remove from ‘une image des femmes confines dans un intérieur, dictée par un point de vue patriarchal et qui ne porte, en réalité, aucune attention à ce qui se passe dans ce cadre’ (Lebovici 2020). This chapter examines the blind spots in the French visual arts landscape that are deftly highlighted through Lebovici’s work. I suggest that, by foregrounding the feminist, the lesbian, the queer artists and activists whose work already exists in those blind spots, she is seeking to remap that very landscape, to rename and reclaim its landmarks, to tear down its sculptures and to create others. As will be demonstrated, the reshaped landscape that emerges is one in which lesbian bodies, visibility and memories are reinscribed, disinterred and re-evaluated, as part of a wider nexus of feminist, queer and postcolonial questions but also in relation to their impact on the everyday banalities of ‘the art world’ (bitter critiques, for example, of choices made for new directors of museums). Ultimately, the digital art space Lebovici has created via her blog and Twitter feed will, themselves, become a key ‘site’ of this new landscape. I argue that they aim not to contain it, though, by offering a single alternative to an existing model, but rather that Lebovici’s extensive art criticism, particularly as it exists in the digital domain, opens up the multiple temporalities and geographies that underpin new queer realms of memory.

Keywords
Queer Studies, France, French visual cultures, Elisabeth Lebovici, art history, social media