Hyper - Diffractive Photographic Diptychs in the Queer Borderlands of Drag and Wrestling

Carl-Mikael Björk

About this exposition

An RC adaptation of the project as presented at the Hugarflug conference, Reykjavik 2025. The presentation takes its point of departure in a photographic artistic research project that moves within the queer borderlands between drag and wrestling – two performative expressions that, through eccentric personas, embodied gestures, and DIY culture, destabilise notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. I approach these practices as arenas of performativity, where the hypermasculine and the hyperfeminine are not positioned in opposition, but meet in mutual tension and unstable, embodied renegotiation. Through photography, in reciprocal movement with essayistic writing, I explore images of identity in motion. The presentation is part of a diffractive methodology, where photographs neither illustrate nor represent, but emerge as entangled with fiction, memory, theory, and philosophy as components of a broader research apparatus. An unstable interplay emerges, where photography and language generate tacit knowledge – a possible, partial and situated enactment of how identity and the body are (re)presented and displaced. The project is diffractively grounded in the thinking of Barad, Butler, and Haraway on research apparatuses, performativity, and situated knowledge – with particular attention to the camera’s and photographer’s access to spaces where identity is performatively negotiated.

type	research exposition
keywords	PHOTOGRAPHY, essayistic, Autoethnographic, Diffractive methodology, conference
date	12/09/2025
published	12/09/2025
last modified	12/09/2025
status	published
copyright	Carl-Mikael Björk
license	CC BY-NC-ND
language	English
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3861719/3861720
doi	https://doi.org/10.22501/rc.3861719
published in	Research Catalogue

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Hyper - Diffractive Photographic Diptychs in the Queer Borderlands of Drag and Wrestling (2025)

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