Queer Practice as Research

I came across this article back in the Fall term. My background is in art, I make art, I need to make art but how do I adapt that into a PhD especially when I haven't made art yet since 2021 lol. I am struggling on that fron as I feel like I am getting lsot in the digital place, I need the PHYSICAL! ANyway queer practice as research was written by Campbell and Farrier that follows, "ideas of messiness and messing things up as a way of describing the methods of PaR." It is bound up witht he researcher and practicioner as one, and sits outside normalized modes of academic research. (consider phenomenology here.) and ideas of contructions of identity THey go on to states: "In queer PaR methodology it is the unruly and leaky body that presents the possibility of knowledge as somewhere beyond the apparent stability of theory’s abstractions, and often beyond the notionally clean lines of Queer Practice as Research academic disciplines. Queer PaR involves crossing disciplinary boundaries (often with scant regard to the propriety of those boundaries). These borders are both theoretical and disciplinary yet also literally physical, often testing the limits of the inside and outside of bodies.7" It is the goal of queer PaR to mess up/with these powerful and normalizing discourses – is what attracts queer researchers to the methodology, thus messing with acaemic institutions. Leading (auto)ethnography scholars Stacey Holman Jones and Tony Adams argue that queer autoethnographic approaches can be seen as muddled, with ‘too much personal mess’ woven into the research,10 yet projects are structured by keeping processes messy, personal and liquid precisely to resist the normative impulse for cleanliness brought about by disciplining knowledge. MESSINESS AS A METHODOLOGY Example: Nando Messias Likewise, ‘failure’ is inbuilt in the work of Farrier’s former PhD student Nando Messias, who ‘fails’ to be a man because he ‘cannot walk like one’. His doctoral practice, which neologized a ‘sissiography’, involved harnessing failure in the embodiment of the sissy as a positive identity position that, in turn, articulates through performance how heteronormative masculinities emerge in the body and how one might resist these processes. His project engages failure as a mode of subjectivity related to the development and sustenance of the sissy and engages with failure as a queer PaR method. Taking the lead from a range of queer work on failure, the practice repeatedly enacted failure in performance through, for instance, falling, fighting and dancing in movement- based studio works, or works that involved Messias enacting sissy-ness on the streets of London. To be clear here, the chance of failure was real, rather than ‘performed’, and involved some personal physical risk.