Prologue

Timespace co-ordinate: Reykjavik, September 2025

It’s not at all a given that I would have access to these spaces.

Especially not the drag scene.

As a 50-year-old, straight, cis man, I’m not the intended audience at Club Mermaid.

If it weren’t for my photographic work, I likely wouldn’t have entered that room at all.

That said, I’ve been met with generosity.

But I’m aware that I may still be seen as someone “looking in” –

both from a generational,

and a gendered perspective.

And maybe it’s that awareness,

along with the question of how my interest in drag began,

that brings me to this attempt at contextualisation.

Let me say a few words about why drag has held more of my attention –

even though drag AND wrestling are equally present in the photo suite.

In both of these performative arts, my attention is drawn to men…

(as in: assigned at birth or read as biologically male)

…men who step onto a stage and, in one way or another, play with gender roles.

But it’s the drag culture that hold my deeper interest.

Maybe because Club Mermaid pulled me in more directly.

Maybe because I’ve spent more time there.

But mostly – because in drag,

the subversive aspects of gender critique become more explicit and pronounced.

Still, in the photographic suite,

images from drag and wrestling are presented as diptychs –

not one setting the stage for the other,

but woven in mutual diffraction.

Over a period of two years, I’ve followed drag performers and wrestling athletes with my camera – backstage, and front row.

Some of those encounters are now shown as photographic diptychs –

I wanted to explore the queer borderlands between hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity.

I don’t claim a queer identity.

But I do try to adopt a queer position.

A queer way of seeing.

And it’s through theoretical and philosophical perspectives

that I can understand and speak about how gender and identity take form –

on stage, and off.

In the essay fragments that will follow,

I recount memories that, in different ways,

trace how masculinity has taken form for me.

These memories are real – or rather, lived.

But of course, they’ve been shaped by time.

And most likely, my way of telling them is shaped by the texts and thoughts

that now help me make sense of them.

In many of the memories, things take on special significance:

a pair of swimming trunks,

a piece of music,

a drawing,

a ribbon.

All of them real objects –

but brought into focus through the lens of Karen Barad,

and their feminist thinking on the material-discursive.

That is: how matter and meaning are made through intra-action

between humans as well as non-humans.

As a backdrop, I also lean on Judith Butler’s ideas –

on how gender is enacted together with and through norms.

On how sex,

gender,

and desire

are not neatly aligned.

And on how gender is performed – without a stable original.

Even if gender isn’t essential –

and masculinity, for instance, has taken many forms over time –

we’re not entirely free to perform gender any way we like.

We’re shaped by norms,

even as we shape them.

These thinkers have guided how I approach these memory-essays.

I touch on theoretical fragments –

not as keys,

but as gestures

in what unfolds.

I hope my memories might direct your gaze

toward how gender is done in everyday life –

and, in turn,

create a diffraction

against the staged performances of drag and wrestling –

where gender is subversed and challenged,

and not at all universally essential in its presupposed essence.

In the spirit of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway,

I approach diffraction not as a method of comparison –

but as a way of thinking with and through difference.

A way of letting expressions, materials and perspectives

cut across each other,

form patterns,

and generate situated knowledge.

Where my photographs don’t illustrate or represent,

but emerge entangled with memory, fiction, theory, and philosophy –

as components in a wider 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.

This presentation – right now – is part of that diffractive methodology.

So.

What follows is neither documentation nor autobiographical confession.

Rather,

it’s an attempt to listen

to how memories, bodies, objects and rooms

speak with and through each other.

What I hope to convey unfolds

in the space between what’s lived and what’s imagined –

where theory acts not as a map,

but as a prism.

And I invite you

to move through this rhizomatic weave

of memory, image and thought –

not to reveal cause and effect,

but to let resonances arise

between what you see,

what you hear,

and what you think.