Queer trash and archival messes: The politics of queer curation

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Art History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Ting, Angela Maria Hipolito

Contributors dc:contributor

• Reitz, Erin

• Queer theory
• archival studies
• curatorial methods
• Filipino Americans
• identity politics
• neoliberalism

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Angela Ting

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F117708