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This study discusses the difference between thinking with and about the island of Ai Stratis for knowledge production, advocating for situated research and embodied experience. Having conducted an ethnographic study, on the island of Ai Stratis in the North Aegean region of Greece in the summer of 2021, I look out from the island, assuming a tree-fold research field, including the physical island of Ai Stratis, a plane of reflexivity, as well as a literary plane. From there, I propose that research method assemblages perform reality,rather than solely describing it, and that foregrounding and backgrounding voices is a micro-political process with far-reaching consequences. I look at what is meant by a multiple reality, the relevance of ethics and care in more-than-human entanglements, and multiple worldings for sustainability understood as futurity. What more, I speak about how those entanglements blur species and material boundaries and how things and beings become with one another through molecular contagion whilst forming shifting assemblages. Discussing Ai Stratis as an island, I speak about some of the lure and danger of falling into geographical determinism and representational thinking. Further, I propose that dwelling in landscape whilst using all the senses (not only sight) may be a step towards practicing noticing and learning to be affected. I argue against strictly representational thinking and against a faceless mass of uniformity, and for the individual, intimate, face-to-face, situated, and embodied. Finally, I extend an invitation to have a conversation about guest-host relations, founded on particular, situated relationships of trust, care, respect, and a willingness to engage with change. I discuss this in the context of my entanglement as a stranger with the human and non-human hosts on Ai Stratis, as well as in a multispecies and a more-than-human, and metaphysical context of sustainability

This essay, through Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, seeks to shift the focus from the society that abjects towards the abjected through a generous reading of two contemporary Swedish queer novels, Du är rötterna som sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats by Eli Levén and Ett så starkt ljus by Lyra Ekström Lindbäck. I discuss how the queer subject relates to different types of borders that Kristeva posits, such as the bodily border, the border of the I, and a moral or societal border. I find that the queer subject has a different relationship to these borders, and view and experience them in ways different than Kristeva suggests. Furthermore, I analyse how the queer subject experiences being made abject. I find that this experience can both be harmful and be somewhat self-sustaining in maintaining societal norms, but also that it can be a way for the queer subject to further position itself as different from a heteronormative society, a position that is truer to who the queer subject feels they are. Through José Esteban Muñoz’ Cruising Utopia I discuss how there are potentialities with being queer, or queer being, such as an expanded worldview and an outstretched concept of possible ways of being and living. The broader aim of this essay is to test Kristeva’s claim that literature is a place for a person to approach the abject, and to examine if literature also has a possibility of portraying an abject position, being a place where the abject itself can examine abjection and being made abject. My conclusion is that this is the case, and furthermore that literature also is a place for the abject to examine potentialities beyond the heteronormative sphere.

This dissertation examines lesbian and queer desire in texts in Catalan and Spanish written in Barcelona, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires from the 1960s to the present. In the texts, desire includes but is not limited to the erotic; it encompasses issues of queer textuality, relationality, and literary transmission. I focus on the works of three authors who have spent the majority of their lives in Barcelona. However, the city appears almost incidentally in their works; the genealogies that the authors trace are transnational. The texts combine literal movement (through exile or diaspora) and a metaphorical sense of being “out of place” that prompts writers to take refuge in writing. I demonstrate that despite depicting affinities beyond the family and nation, the works reveal the persistence of familial and national ties, albeit in spectral or queer ways. Rather than tracing continuous lines of descent that emphasise origins, the works are principally concerned with futurity and fragmentation, as in Michel Foucault’s reading of genealogy. Chapter One on Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994) traces a literary genealogy from Sappho to Renée Vivien in fin de siècle Paris to Marçal. The novel represents a merging of literary desire and erotic desire; Marçal’s search for symbolic mothers turns out to be a search for symbolic lovers that is oriented towards the present and future. In Chapter Two, I posit that in Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos (1984) “happiness” consists of being open to chance and unpredictability unlike in conventional “happy” scripts in which a valuable life is believed to consist of (heterosexual) marriage, children, and property ownership. In Part II I argue that through fragmentation, allegory, and ambiguity, Peri Rossi’s El libro de mis primos (1969) contests authoritarian discourse without itself becoming a site of hegemonic meaning. In inviting the reader’s collaboration, it ensures authorial legacy. Part I of Chapter Three is an analysis of the temporality of obsession in Flavia Company’s Querida Nélida (1988). I propose that obsession and melancholia may point to a utopian future rather than signalling an entrapment in the past. My study of Melalcor (2000) in Part II suggests that queer forms of relationality that are not centred on procreation and monogamy offer ethical models of sociality. Part III focusses on Company’s return to biological family in Volver antes que ir (2012) and Por mis muertos (2014). The resurgence in these texts of family members who have died signals that just as the queer haunts the family, the family haunts the queer.

This thesis examines strategies of anticipation in contemporary post-cinematic art. In the Introduction and the first chapter, I make the case for anticipation as a cultural technique for the construction of and adjustment to future scenarios. This framing allows analysis of constructions of futures as culturally and media-historically specific operations. Via anticipation, constructions of futures become addressable as embedded in specific performative and material economies: as regimes of prediction. The hypothesis is that cultural techniques of anticipation do not only serve to construct particular future scenarios, but also futurity, the very condition for the construction of futures. Drawing upon the philosophical works of, in particular, Vilem Flusser, Jacques Derrida and Elena Esposito, and the theory of cultural techniques, I conceptualize anticipation through the analysis of post-cinematic strategies. I argue that post-cinematic art is particularly apt for the conceptualization of anticipation. The self-reflexive multi-media interventions of post-cinematic art can expose the realisms that govern regimes of prediction. Three cultural techniques of anticipation and their use as artistic strategies in post-cinematic art are theorized: enactment, soft montage and rendering. Each of these techniques is examined in its construction of futures through performative and material operations in art gallery spaces. The second chapter examines strategies of enactment in post-cinematic installations by Neïl Beloufa. My readings of Kempinski (2007), The Analyst, the Researcher, the Screenwriter, the CGI tech and the Lawyer (2011), World Domination (2012) and Data for Desire (2014) propose that enactment allows for an engagement with futures beyond extrapolation. With Karen Barad's theory of agential realism, the construction of futures becomes graspable as a political process in opposition to a mere prolonging of the present into the future. The third chapter focuses on the strategy of soft montage in works by Harun Farocki. I interpret Farocki's application of soft montage in the exhibition Serious Games I-IV (2009-2010) as a critical engagement with anticipatory forms of organizing power and distributing precarity. His work series Parallel I-IV (2012-2014) is then analyzed as a speculation on the future of image production technologies and their role in constructing futures. The final chapter analyses the self-referential use of computer-generated renderings in works by Hito Steyerl. The installations How Not To Be Seen (2013), Liquidity Inc. (2014), The Tower (2015) and ExtraSpaceCraft (2016) are read as interventions in the performative economies of contemporary image production. I argue that these works allow us to grasp the reality-producing and futurity-producing effects of rendering as anticipatory cultural technique. My thesis aims to contribute to the discussions on a 'turn towards the future' in contemporary philosophy and cultural criticism. My research thus focuses on the following set of questions. What can we learn about the operations of future construction through encounters with post-cinematic art? How are futures and future construction framed in such art? What realisms do future constructions rely on? And how can anticipation as a cultural technique be politicized and democratized?