Koby Bryan Hansen
Koby Bryan Hansen
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Koby Bryan Hansen is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. They hold a Bachelor’s Degree with honors in Spanish with a minor in LGBTQ Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master’s Degree in Spanish from the University of California, Riverside. He also holds certificates in university teaching from the University of California, Riverside and in Contemporary Hispanophone Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Koby Bryan Hansen is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. They hold a Bachelor’s Degree with honors in Spanish with a minor in LGBTQ Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master’s Degree in Spanish from the University of California, Riverside. He also holds certificates in university teaching from the University of California, Riverside and in Contemporary Hispanophone Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
His research focuses on contemporary queer cultural production in Mexico, with an emphasis on occupations of space and representations of pleasure in film and literature. He is currently working on a dissertation that explores representations of cruising in contemporary Mexican narrative.
His research focuses on contemporary queer cultural production in Mexico, with an emphasis on occupations of space and representations of pleasure in film and literature. He is currently working on a dissertation that explores representations of cruising in contemporary Mexican narrative.
What is Critical Cruising Studies and Why Do We Care?
What is Critical Cruising Studies and Why Do We Care?
“Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as “who” or “what” we direct our energy and attention toward. A queer phenomenology, perhaps, might start by redirecting our attention toward different objects, those that are “less proximate” or even those that deviate or are deviant.” -Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
"I do see an unlimited potentiality in actual queer sex, but books of criticism that simply glamorize the ontology of gay male cruising are more often than not simply boring. In this book I do nonetheless distill some real theoretical energy from historical accounts of fucking and utopia… Indeed this book asks one to cruise the fields of the visual and not so visual in an effort to see in the anticipatory illumination of the utopian." -José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
It's nothing new to say that queer folks inhabit the world in a very different way; social and historical circumstances have necessitated that sexually dissident and gender nonconforming folks create other ways to exist within spaces, especially public spaces. Cruising is one of the ways that queer people have carved out space for community and the (somewhat) free expression of sexuality. It offers both an ontological insight into gender/sexual identity and also a potential for non-cisheteronormative epistemologies.
I came to cruising (no pun intended) as a way of escaping the typically violent, very traumatic way that queer stories have traditionally been told. For me, critical cruising studies is a way of making space for narratives and critical theorizations of pleasure, to show that the way that queerness is talked about does not have to be through the lens of violence.
My research does not seek to legitimize cruising as a political practice of sexual dissidence (though it can be), nor does it seek to moralize about the ethics of cruising. Instead, I seek to understand what we know and what we can learn about gender, sexuality, space and the intersection of all three through critical representations of cruising in Mexican narrative.
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