Dreaming Our Desire

Insurgent promise in queer artistic practice

Dreaming Our Desire served as my undergraduate honors paper at Macalester College. It was submitted in April of 2000, under my previous name. Here is a copy of the absrtract:

Dreaming Our Desire: Insurgent promise in queer artistic practice explores strategies among queer cultural workers to reimagine the possibilities of living with difference. It investigates how a diverse range of queer artists, performers, filmmakers and writers are creatively inhabiting moments of crisis, disruption and destabilization to reconfigure subjectivity and collectivity. I draw from various theoretical discourses ЦЦ including deconstruction, psychoanalysis, antiracist cultural studies and poststructuralist queer feminist theory ЦЦ to understand how queer cultural workers are offering the terms of a radical cultural politics, one that substantively respects cultural difference as central to antiauthoritarian struggle.

The copy available here differs from the orginal. It is missing one key chapter, "Fragments of a Promise: Social dis/articulations in anarchopunk queer zines." This chapter contains several graphics from zines. I intend to scan and include this piece as soon as I have access to a scanner. "Fragments of a Promise" rests between "Diasporic Visions of Desire" and "Give Yourself Away." I have corrected my name in the title page. Lastly, it is formatted slightly differently. The only significant change is the reduction in the total number of pages from 183 to 164 through a slightly smaller font.

I have not, more subtly, corrected my gender. I was not out as trans when I was writing Dreaming Our Desire. The Women's Studies Program at my college was hardly the safest environment in which to come out. At the time, I identified myself as femme and gender questioning, both of which make vague appearances in this text. Several times I also refer to myself as a boy, something I wouldn't do now.

Being three years old there is of course a great deal I would change now. Such is writing and learning across time. But reading it over, I feel reasonably good about the whole document, and comfortable with sharing it.

The thesis, as a near whole or split into sections, is available at left. Each is a pdf document, openable with Adobe Reader. The whole text includes most of the 164 pages. Or, you can download the text in seven of its eight parts.

This honors paper, like all the material on my website, is copywrited. Please ask my permission before any form of distribution, beyond a link to this site.