title: From the logic of the lure to the force of the erotic: cruising a personal AIDS video archive from a curatorial perspective
Creators: name: Speretta, Tommaso
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2025

description: 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.