Investigating the resurgence of abstraction in the work of contemporary artists who are marked as non-normative primarily in terms of gender or sexuality, this dissertation reconsiders the tension between form and content that is still an active problem of modernism to demonstrate how form’s excess is mined in a current wave of practice as a generator of possibility. I analyze the recent turn to tactics of abstraction among contemporary artists often analyzed in terms of identity to take seriously what is at stake in taking up a history of abstract forms that might seem unavailable to artists read in terms of their difference. The tactics of abstraction central to this study alter the logics of difference by deploying certain modernist forms in ways that “drag away” from the hold of representation. This dissertation makes two contributions to current scholarship. First, it charts a genealogical trajectory and transhistorical affiliation between modernist abstract artists and their contemporary interlocutors in order to demonstrate how new work with such modernist devices as the grid and the monochrome alter how we read the genealogies of these forms. Second, this dissertation posits abstraction as a contemporary practice of queering that moves beyond what is currently a focus on biography in art historical accounts of minority artists. Instead of reading abstract forms as encoded signs of identity, I argue that formal tactics of abstraction do their transformative work by an excess that defies the presumed legibility of difference.