University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Queer trash and archival messes: The politics of queer curation

Ting, Angela Maria Hipolito

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117708

Description

Title
Queer trash and archival messes: The politics of queer curation
Author(s)
Ting, Angela Maria Hipolito
Issue Date
2022-08-16
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Reitz, Erin
Department of Study
Art & Design
Discipline
Art History
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
  • Queer theory
  • archival studies
  • curatorial methods
  • Filipino Americans
  • identity politics
  • neoliberalism
Abstract
This thesis uses queer curatorial practices to analyze the GLBT Historical Society’s Filipino Task Force on AIDS (FTFA) collection, which is comprised of the ephemeral archival material of a health organization that served queer and trans Filipinos in the Bay Area from 1988 to 2005. Queer curatorial practices are methods that subvert typical notions of curation and exhibition through radical political agency. These methods are put into practice through the speculative exhibition Para sa atin. The collection of queer ephemera, also known as queer trash, is driven by affective fetishism. The illegibility of queer trash and queer messes, rooted in their resistance to representation, is what gives archival objects the political potential for queer radicalism. However, neoliberal cultural institutions such as universities and museums seek to quantify and tokenize minoritized populations. From this contradiction, I propose speculative queer curatorial methods to find a way to work with objects (such as those in the FTFA collection) that refuses to reproduce neoliberal institutionality and uses queer world-building to dream of liberated futures. Nevertheless, queer failure characterizes the imagined nature of Para sa atin, leaving behind ephemeral traces that speculate on new modes of queer living that can be rehearsed in the present.
Graduation Semester
2022-12
Type of Resource
Thesis
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2022 Angela Ting

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