Cruising the Archive

Abstract

Beginning with the work of David Hockney and a personal selection of popular fictional texts of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, this article explores the expressive connection between visual culture and sexual identity that a range of disciplines have established around the practices and pleasures that in the 20th century became known as ‘homosexual’. As an alternative to these disciplinary protocols of identification, ‘cruising’ is proposed as a model that can undermine the commitment to ‘detection’ and revelation evident in a broad range of projects within and beyond gay studies and queer theory. Although often somewhat informal, ‘cruising’ is not represented as the alternative to more professional forms of investigation, but understood as a form of practice always already caught up in the disciplines that it attempts to dodge and the understandings that it seeks to displace.