Paper Proposal

             Angela McRobbie begins her introduction to the “Queer Adventures in Cultural Studies” issue by referring to Judith Butler’s recurring request in Bodies That Matter that “queer politics continually interrogate itself.”  It is this sense of queerness as a destabilizing and creative conceptual and political force that frames the articles in this issue of the Cultural Studies journal, taken up in a variety of different ways and for various ends.  I seek to continue this critical trajectory by investigating the ways in which a cultural studies approach lends itself to thinking issues of queerness through media.  I will focus of the work of queer video artist Ryan Trecartin, which foregrounds issues of performativity and queer subjectivity similarly taken up throughout the journal issue, to structure and limit the scope of my discussion.  Moreover, Trecartin presents a particularly interesting case for a cultural studies approach since, although he is an artist whose video work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, he has made all his videos available to watch for free on his YouTube and Vimeo accounts, enabling a sort of queering of the art object itself.               

As a second dimension of this paper, I am also interested in interrogating the ways in which Deleuzian/Deleuzio-Guattarian theory can productively be used in a (queer) cultural studies approach.  I was surprised by the repeated references to their work in several articles in this journal issue but also in other articles we have come across this semester.  While on one hand, the interdisciplinary approach and the political stakes of their work resonate with those of cultural studies (and of queerness) and have been championed by cultural studies scholars such as Lawrence Grossberg, Deleuze’s writings on cinema tend to establish a hierarchy between the cinemas of the auteurs he focuses on in his two volume work and popular (“bad”) cinema (and television).  In this regard, I am intrigued at the prospect of recuperating Deleuze for cultural studies, as Lawrence Grossberg has, and investigating what he has to offer queer cultural studies in particular.