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

Carl-Mikael Björk

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.

References - explicitly and implicitly used

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BARAD, Karen (2011). ‘Nature's Queer Performativity.’ Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 19 no. 2, p. 121-158.

BARAD, Karen (2014). ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart’, Parallax, 20(3), pp. 168–187.

BUTLER, Judith (2006[1999]). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. [1st ed.] New York: Routledge

BUTLER, Judith (2011[1993]). Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of "sex". Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge

DELEUZE, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (2012). ’Introduktion: Rhizom (översättning till Svenska M. Hultman)’, in Posthumanistiska Nyckeltexter, ed. by Åsberg, Hultman och Lee. Lund: Studentlitteratur

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HARAWAY, Donna (1988). ’Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’ Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.

HARAWAY, Donna (1992). ’The promise of monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.’ In Cultural Studies, ed Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, 295-337. New York: Routledge.

HARAWAY, Donna (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse: feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge

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Carl-Mikael Björk - Hyper - Diffractive Photographic Diptychs in the Queer Borderlands of Drag and Wrestling - 2025