Thesis Supervisor: Hypatia Vourloumis 

Thesis: Queer Longing: Performances of Deviant Lifeworlds

July 2020

Abstract

“Queer Longing” investigates the interconnectedness of queer subjects and how they navigate through the performance of longing beyond the present, striving for worlds full of hope and possibilities. In their rejection of the now through detection of the “cracks” in the heteronormative present, deviant queer subjects dream and enact new queer lifeworlds that serve as survival strategies. Beginning with the role of art and cultural institutions, and critiquing their exoticization and appropriation of trans*- and queerness, the institution sets the premise for the artist’s working conditions, under which artists such as self-proclaimed drag terrorist Christeene, or Colombian choreographer Jao Moon and his motley dance crew have to negotiate these dominant normative structures. This thesis moves through various examples of queer performances and spaces and serves as a queer archive that exercises the various forms of queer longing through acts of vigilance and counter-movements bound up with gentrification, capitalization, exoticization, hetero-, and homonormativity, and questions around queer identity, race, and sexuality expanding the queer horizon of possibilities using the dancefloors, and various other (semi-public) queer spaces to communally enact queer longing with the notion of hope. 

Author: Julian Fricker