Looking for love: an inter(-sectional dys-)course

Tan, Kai Syng (2025) Looking for love: an inter(-sectional dys-)course. In, Spectrums of Sexuality.

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

Invited, in progress. Applying the big-picture and risk-taking approaches of neurodivergence, I cultivate creative interventions to catalyse conversation and action towards dismantling (neuro-)normative, colonialist and other harmful cultures and structures. Love is the subject, method and proposed outcome of my current creative research programme Looking for Love, 2024-2029, and this new diagram is part of this endeavour. Drawing on and extending findings from my book, Neuro-Futurism & Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z For Collective Liberation (Palgrave MacMillan 2024), including the introduction of ‘monster-mapping’ as a creative strategy of ‘way-finding and re-direction during and beyond crisis’ (Tan 2024), I will create a new diagram to articulate a creative, decolonial, neuroqueered practice of intimacy.

The title reflects the playfulness of my approach, as well as how my discussion is anchored in an intersectional, tentacular prism, and draws on my discussions of ‘discourse’ — and knowledge-making as necessarily embodied, dynamic, creative mobilities process. The diagram will reference how marginalised culture workers have discussed love such as Baldwin, hooks, Lorde, Friere et al. I will also discuss and extend past explorations such as Hinder (a dating app which encourages inter-species entanglement) and Speed-Dates (eg with neuro-queering proponent Nick Walker 2023 and artist Bob and Roberta Smith in How to Thrive in 2050!, BBC Culture in Quarantine 2021, and the public in an exhibition-cum-performance on a ‘Neuro-futuristic 2050’ at Attenborough Arts Centre 2022).

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