Intimate Relations: What Makes Performance Queer? What Makes Queer Performative? is a talk based on Amelia Jones's book project Intimate Relations, in which Jones traces the interrelated history of the terms "queer" and "performative," and how the terms have informed our thinking about queerness, performance, and queer performance since the 1950s. In examining their mutual implication, Jones explores a number of works that represent at least one mode of "queer performance," including works by artists Asco, Ron Athey, Rocio Bolivar, Zackary Drucker, Rafa Esparza, William Pope.L, and Vaginal Davis.

Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design. Trained in art history, film theory, and performance studies, and widely read in philosophy and identity theory, Jones is known for her work elaborating a queer, anti-racist, feminist history and theory of modern and contemporary Euro-American visual arts, including performance, film, video, and installation. Her current research addresses the confluence of "queer," "feminist," and "performance" in the visual arts, and recent publications explore the ideological implications of claims of presence in performance and visual art discourse (in TDR), the usefulness of new materialist theory to the study of performative art practices (also in TDR), and numerous articles addressing the work of artists previously marginalized from art discourse and institutions, including Ulay, Senga Nengudi, Faith Wilding, and Martha Wilson.

Jones is the author of numerous books, including Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006), Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (2004), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), and the editor or co-editor of anthologies including The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (new edition 2010), Sexuality (2014) in the Whitechapel Documents series, and, with Adrian Heathfield, Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (2012). Jones has also curated such landmark exhibitions as "Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History," held at UCLA's Armand Hammer Museum of Art in 1996. Her exhibition Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art took place in 2013 in Montreal.

Amelia Jones on Marcel Duchamp