Beyond Categories: New Models for Identity Today

Why It Matters

Understanding identity as a mutable, plastic construct reshapes how art, academia, and policy address DEI, cultural appropriation, and biopolitical power in a polarized era.

Key Takeaways

• Jess Fan uses biomaterials to expose constructed gender and race categories.
• Identity is framed as plastic, constantly reshaped by technology and culture.
• Panelists link historical medical portraiture to modern biopolitical identity debates.
• DEI backlash illustrates how identity politics become weaponized in public discourse.
• Yale exhibition encourages interdisciplinary dialogue on queerness, race, and regenerative art.

Summary

The Yale University Art Gallery hosted a multidisciplinary conversation titled “Beyond Categories: New Models for Identity Today,” anchored by Jess Fan’s exhibition “Just Fan Unbounded.” Curator Margaret Euing introduced the show, which traces Fan’s decade‑long practice of merging abstract sculpture with biological materials to interrogate the porous, mutable nature of identity.

Speakers highlighted how Fan’s work—injecting urine, melanin, synthetic testosterone into glass, casting body parts, and 3D‑printing CT scans—exposes identity as a plastic, technologically mediated construct. Pamela Lee framed identity as “plastic,” arguing that historical and contemporary art continuously reshapes gender, race, and species boundaries, while Al Steiner and Tavian Nyango connected these ideas to colonial medical portraiture and current biopolitical debates.

Lee’s opening remark, “I am a ghost coming back from the 1980s,” underscored the persistence of identity politics from the culture wars to today’s DEI backlash. Examples ranged from 19th‑century Chinese medical portraits to Gen‑Z wellness memes that commodify “Chineseess,” illustrating how identity can be both a site of oppression and a viral cultural commodity.

The discussion signals a shift toward interdisciplinary analysis—melding art history, science‑technology studies, and Black queer theory—to rethink categorization. For institutions, it underscores the urgency of addressing identity’s fluidity in curatorial practice, academic research, and public policy, especially as political forces weaponize identity narratives.

Original Description

This interdisciplinary panel brings together artists and scholars in a conversation about new models for studying identity in the present moment. Inspired by Jes Fan’s artistic practice—which challenges assumptions about binary categorization, including of race and gender—the program combines brief presentations and conversation to draw out many of the themes within the exhibition. Introduced and moderated by Margaret Ewing, the Gallery’s Horace W. Goldsmith Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Participants include Pamela M. Lee, the Carnegie Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Department of the History of Art, Yale University; Tavia Nyong’o, the William Lampson Professor of American Studies, Black Studies, Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University; and A.L. Steiner, Senior Critic, Yale School of Art.

Generously cosponsored by the Gallery’s Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund and Happy and Bob Doran Artist-in-Residence Fund; the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; the Yale School of Art; and the American Studies Program and Department of the History of Art of Yale University. Offered in conjunction with the exhibition Jes Fan: Unbounded. Exhibition made possible by the Happy and Bob Doran Artist-in-Residence Fund and the Joann and Gifford Phillips, Class of 1942, Fund.