The Stains Queers Leave Behind

The Stains Queers Leave Behind: Dance-Theatre, Poetry, and Archival Reimaginings

In this seminar Billie Mitsikakos (DPhil, University of Oxford) brings into dialogue the dance-theater of Dimitris Papaioannou and the poetry of C.P. Cavafy to consider the traces queer bodies leave behind through movement and contact: imprints of limbs and blotched cloths that are neither disposed of nor archived in the conventional sense but nonetheless kept close in counterintuitive ways. Drawing on semiotic theory Mitsikakos asks what alternative insights into knowing and registering queer being the insistence on such remains offers and argues that such queer indexical stains disrupt dominant archival norms and radically reimagine the archive as non-authoritative, participatory, and inclusive.

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