Abstract/Summary

Conceived from the outset as interconnected pieces—entwining the theoretical and personal dimensions of the queer subject in resistance to a mainstream academic methodological imperative—the chapters comprising this thesis examine, from a Western perspective, the project undertaken by artists, filmmakers, writers, and academics to force HIV/AIDS into the realm of representation. Ultimately, the thesis argues for the unrepresentability of HIV/AIDS and for the failure of the logics of representation arising from the advent of AIDS to “speak” the unspeakable. In an attempt to wrestle with this impossibility, artists and writers have (historically) clung on, consciously or not, and contributed to amassing the already boundless visual and literary territories of HIV/AIDS. The project to move AIDS to an elsewhere of discourse and representation, where it could eventually cease to signify itself, has tragically failed. The intellectual debt evident throughout this thesis is to the work of Michel Foucault, focussing on the power of ideology and social regulations to define identities, examined via the deconstructive linguistic analysis, textual practice, and post-structural feminist critique of Paula A. Treichler and Lee Edelman, among others. Through the lens of John Paul Ricco’s “attraction of the lure” and William Haver’s “erotic of a queer poiesis,” to which the title alludes, the thesis pays tribute to the interrelationship between identity formation and representation. Its structure directly cites Jacques Derrida’s “unreadable” book Glas, as a means to symbolically express the promiscuity of the methodology by which the research has been conducted. The thesis unfolds against the presence of an absence, a certain ghost or spectre that has permeated the research, reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s ideas around the “studium” and the “punctum”: a decade of experimental and independent AIDS moving images that I have metaphorically cruised as an experiment in building alternative knowledge about HIV/AIDS. In its incessant entanglement of the personal with the theoretical, the promiscuous methodology of this thesis ultimately asks: “How can we transform the epistemological ground into a cruising ground?” The thesis invites the reader to consider the potential outcomes of a promiscuous research methodology, not only as a system of knowledge production, but also as a catalyst of energies (whether cultural, political, theoretical, artistic, or even “just” emotional) that shape the experience of knowledge production—not in the direction of a unitary, stable, and ultimate, therefore hegemonic, intellectual achievement but, to the contrary, towards a site of difference, of all forms of becoming. Applied to the curatorial field, the thesis advances the following questions: Can cruising and the queer experience of sexual promiscuity be used as a research method? Can the curatorial be a place to perform promiscuity as a way to escape the normalising discourse perpetuated by society and problematise the trajectories imposed by art history? Framed in this light, the curatorial becomes a space of appearance that seeks neither a positive nor a negative self-affirmation. To the contrary, it embraces the uncertainty, the risk, the atemporality, and the obliqueness of an experience of cruising, rather than responding to the imperative of achieving historical closure in regard to the object of inquiry or the conditions for aesthetic and artistic production. Ultimately, a promiscuous curatorial methodology seeks to create the conditions for multiple subjectivities to emerge and co-exist; in other words, for being in common with no need to strictly embrace any condition of belonging.