Queer Spaces

During my PhD, I conducted an empirical field study (participant observation, interviews) to investigate how agency is produced in practices within queer spaces. My approach was agency ‘after subject critique’ related to feminist and post/decolonial critiques of the notion of an autonomous, white, male, Western, bourgeois subject. My research focused on a field that has set out to live subject and identity critique. Practices of indeterminacy were approached with a performative, relational-new-materialist understanding of agency following Karen Barad. These practices emerge from non-intelligible subject positions, deal with those positions, or use in_determinacy. The dissertation was guided by the core question: how do practices of particularly precarious subjects expand the possibilities of ways of queer life? This research highlighted how queer productions of space and affect prove to be central and how distinctions can be made between different types of interfering agency; of felt, collective and affective agency.