ABSTRACT
What does it mean to write architecture affectively, or with affect in mind? How is the question of the political to be reinscribed into architectural discourse surrounding affect – not just through the content of its discourse, but by way of modes of writing as well? Furthermore, what is at stake when foregrounding the affective tonality of critique? And how should the queer roots of affect inquiry be acknowledged in the field of affect studies? These are some of the questions this chapter raises in order to indicate the limitations of common approaches to writing architectural affects. The chapter is composed of two parallel texts: a list of theoretical points inspired by key readings; and an autofictional account of a choreographic improvisation in which human and architectural bodies came together in queer conjunctions. Using Jack Halberstam’s notion of queer scavenging as a starting point and building on past writerly experiments, as well as theoretical propositions by writers such as Sara Ahmed and Sianne Ngai, this text offers one possible way of confronting and conjoining the theoretical with the performative, in a call for a more diverse range of affective approaches to how we think and write.
