This special issue of British Art Studies foregrounds the specificity and political potential of queer art in Britain, taking the 1980s as a critical context through which to examine intersecting artistic, political and theoretical practices that continue to resonate today. Marked by Section 28, the HIV/AIDS crisis and the consolidation of neoliberalism, the 1980s is explored here not as a singular origin point but as a space of artistic innovation and theoretical capacity, a site of opposition and resistance to the straightened prospects for queer artistic organising and intervention now.

Contributions include new research articles that grapple with historic forms of art production and organising, cross-generational interviews, archival reflections, and commissioned artistic responses. Together, they offer points of departure for thinking about the kind of queer and feminist communities needed in the present.

Against the backdrop of unprecedented precarity in queer cultural production in the United Kingdom, this issue asks what it means to commit recent histories of queer art to the record, and how the frame of art history might limit or expand what is possible.