OCAD University Open Research Repository

How to Make a Queer Counterpublic

Chasse, Jenna (2021) How to Make a Queer Counterpublic. Masters thesis, OCAD University.

Item Type: Thesis
Creators: Chasse, Jenna
Abstract:

Situated at the intersections of ethnography, relational aesthetics, and curatorial practice, this thesis explores and promotes the radical aspirations of queer worldmaking through an analysis of COVID-19 specific queer exchange across digital spheres. Drawing from queer theorists, Lauren Berlant, Michael Warner, and José Muñoz alongside the creative contributions of three fellow queer artists, Madeleine Lychek, B Wijshijer, and Racquel Rowe, a critical future – one that is ripe with queer desire, exchange, and intervention – is embodied within both the making and writing components of this project. The aim of this work is to unearth everything you wanted to know about sex (but queer theory forgot to tell you). That is, to discuss the kinds of exchange that queer theory has too often omitted from its discourse which is typically the kind that heterosexual culture is unable to name. This might be things like fucking your friends, fucking for money, fantasizing about sex with objects, masturbating with strangers online, camming, and so on. It might also be the kind of sex that doesn’t immediately read as pleasurable or erotic, but rather, perplexing or awkward. A collaborative worldmaking project that began as a theoretical query of capitalist economies of exchange, this thesis is an interventionist curatorial undertaking wherein a group of queer collaborators exhibit their sex and exchange as it is mediated by publics. From here, we can think about how proliferation of these publics might inform new modalities for queerness and what this could mean for the making of queer utopia. Though the process of creating queer worlds is never this linear, this thesis interrogates the heteronormative present, looks towards a queer future, and exhibits a host of exchanges, pleasures, and sex that lie at the center of this worldmaking process.

Date: 2021
Divisions: Graduate Studies > Criticism and Curatorial Practice
Date Deposited: 07 May 2021 13:55
Last Modified: 20 Dec 2021 20:45
URI: https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/3377

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