Poesis of Romani Queer Utopia

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine the potential for queer and feminist resistance and self-envisioning in the face of gypsylorism and antiziganism by engaging with the artistic practices of Romani LGBTQIA+ artists. The thesis focuses primarily on three artworks: the theatre play Roma Armee; Delain Le Bas´s ongoing performance Romani Embassy; and Dan Perjovschi´s drawing on glass Untitled. In Poesis of Romani Queer Utopia, I theorize the articulations and negotiations of subjectivities, belonging and becoming. I investigate the internalization of phobic charges that render Romani LGBTQIA+ lives precarious but also the practices of resistance in a world where Romani LGBTQIA+ lives are at constant risk of violence, othering, persecution, and dehumanisation. I employ disidentification to foreground the complexity and diversity of the articulations and negotiations of identity that take place within the artistic and cultural works analysed. I use hope as a critical methodology, and queerness as a horizon, to develop a world-making practice of imagining different futurities. By employing these concepts, I articulate my own concept of self-envisioning as a nonreactive mode of becoming. I use self-envisioning to name a processual, transformative practice of becoming that involves working on dominant cultural representational tropes that assemble language, reflexivity, visuality, and ways of expressing being beyond the bounds of survival. I use the concept of the impasse to theorise how gypsylorism and the “Conceptual Gypsy” suspend Romani identities in time and frame Roma as an antithesis of contemporality. The concept of the impasse enables me to explore the role of affect as an obstruction of agency in articulating subjectivity. I engage with autoethnography and the artistic materials in order to offer a processual and transformative reading of those obstructions. My research answers questions of how art and cultural productions of artists of Romani heritage impact and complicate knowledge production that theorise Romani identities, resistance and survival strategies; and how aesthetic practices reshape ways of thinking about agency, subjectivity, and becoming.