This practice-led PhD research investigates the affective and embodied materialisations of long-term endurance of cisheteronormative structures. At its core, my research is concerned with exposing the possible ways in which white, cisgender, heteronormative and patriarchal frameworks are nonconsciously processed. I build on the concept material intangibilities to rethink how form — the production and reproduction of patterns — travels, spreads, diffuses in efferently multiple and afferently unpredictable ways.

My research challenges questions of corroborability in relation to realities that are not capturable through normative forms of legibility. I give an embodied account of the viscerality of affect involved in the process of endurance, when my own identification began by being imposed rather than self-asserted; I allow for my injuries to speak their shape, and in doing so, I highlight the materiality of injuries that are dismissed due to the way they are made invisible, and therefore less important; by prioritising invisibilised injuries and microaggressions, I expose embodied and embedded forms of normality allowed to operate as tools for white, cisgender, heteronormative, and patriarchal supremacy.

I position my research in relation to Feminist, queer and decolonial practices that have been providing critiques to white-western patriarchal knowledge systems and their hindering of social justice (da Silva: 2007, 2016, 2019; Hartman: 2012; Jackson: 2020; Wynter: 2013). I draw on thinking frameworks put forward through investigations on nonconscious cognition (Hayles: 2017, 2019), queer aesthetics (Macharia: 2019; Musser: 2014, 2018), Linguistics (Yao: 2021), and semiotics (Kohn: 2013) to inquire how form is processed, propelled, and absorbed consciously and nonconsciously.

Operating under a fine art methodological framework, I exercise a practice-led approach to what I am calling nonconscious semiosis of affect: the production and reproduction of patterns, and how the remembering of sensations is tied to affective experiences archived in the body. I use still and moving image, archival retrieval, photographic assemblages, and writing to create speculative non-fictional narratives that challenge pre-established perceptions of embodiment. In doing so, I weave injury and repair, joy and anger, tiredness and endurance through patterns of resistance that reveal how the [hopeful] absence of white, cisgender, heteronormative, and patriarchal structures enable non-hetero futurities to be materialised in the present.