These topics are just as relevant to earlier centuries as they are to the present day. The common research interest of art and cultural studies in gender studies aims to analyse and comment on the role of art and visual culture in the production of gender binaries and the associated power structures. Dealing with the cultural and social constructedness of gender and gender relations is particularly important because the binary gender order (male/female) is often used to legitimise hierarchies, hegemonies and the naturalisation of inequalities.

Under the premise that the production of meaning and the production of power are inextricably linked, the category of gender must be discussed in conjunction with other categories - categories that are also partly responsible for inequalities and on the basis of which privileges are justified, consolidated and often stubbornly defended. The categories of ethnicity, religion, class, territory, age, ability, sexual orientation and others require particular attention. In order to research these categorically determined systems of knowledge, organisation and also mediation in the fields of art and visual culture, cooperation between different (cultural studies) disciplines is necessary and beneficial.

Ultimately, it is also about the history and construction of disciplinary objects, which have been and are subject to continuous revision, as are the responsibilities and limitations of individual subjects. Their circumscription and expansion through questions that conceptually include the category of gender together with other hegemonically effective categories affects not only the largely westernised concept of art and artists, but also the materiality, mediality, spatial and temporal structure of artistic works. Cultural orders, techniques and apparatuses are increasingly coming into focus.

Under the current conditions of a globalisation of the art world, in which politically conservative values and discriminatory behaviour are often recalled and enforced, the danger of renewed exclusions is great - if it is not possible to relativise the constitutive significance of the constructions of (Western) modernity AND gender for the ideas of art, artists and art institutions, which have long been considered valid. Transcultural perspectives and gender equality are also fundamental for gender research in art studies.

While gender studies focuses primarily on biological(sex) and socio-cultural sex(gender), queer studies is also interested in the long-neglected category of sexuality or sexualdesire. This broadening of the research question firstly criticises heteronormative structures and ideas and examines them with regard to normalising effects and mechanisms of cultural regulatory procedures such as homogenisation constraints. Beyond the supposedly natural heterosexual binary gender, which still often powerfully produces exclusions, it is also about all genders and sexualities: homosexuals/gays and lesbians, bisexuals, trans*people, intersex people, transInterQueers and many more. Their thematisation in art and visual (everyday) culture, in theory, politics and political activism is just as much a subject as the readings and re-readings of non-heteronormative concepts, narratives, perspectives and fantasies. Questions about the politics of invisibility/visibility and the connection between knowledge and what is visible or given to be seen and thus about the possibilities of thwarting and effectively shifting prevailing codes of intelligibility also move to the centre.