Artistic works that oppose (or at least question) traditional gender perceptions are increasingly attracting public attention. These queer or queer-labelled positions from art, music and media/popular culture combine different artistic and aesthetic/technical forms of expression, i.e. they argue intermedially and are interdisciplinary in nature. As queer artistic productions, they explicitly oppose heteronormative structures, regulations and power relations, to which they seek alternatives. They are at the centre of the cultural studies-oriented Helene Lange Kolleg "Queer Studies and Intermediality: Art - Music - Media Culture".

On the one hand, a diversity of social and sexual identities is thematised, and on the other, a fundamental critique of the notion of fixed identities. The focus is on the long-neglected category of sexuality or sexualdesire. Up to now, interest has focussed primarily on biological(sex) and socio-culturalgender. This research is now being expanded by queer studies to include the power-politically important issue of sexuality and other normative and normalising systems of order.

The term queer, which initially circulated as a homophobic and transphobic slur in the sense of weird, strange and wrong, but then experienced a positive re-appropriation as a political (self-)designation since the 1980s and increasingly since the 1990s, reverses the perspective: heterosexuality and heteronormativity are no longer to be taken for granted, but are marked as the 'other'. This allows the question of what is actually 'normal' to be posed anew and its hegemonic and normalism-theoretical relevance to be fundamentally problematised.

Queer and intermedial works question traditional, seemingly self-evident habits of perception and interpretation and open up new ways of reading. The artistic positions we are interested in are to be researched together with their reception, such as art-critical reviews in a daily newspaper and musical re-enactments on YouTube, as well as the interpretations proposed in academic studies. In this way, the non-heteronormative concepts, narratives, fantasies and utopias put up for discussion in the works are multiplied, commented on and further negotiated.