The queer afterlives of texts

Four years after I published my thesis Whirling Stories: Postsocialist Feminist Imaginaries and the Visual Arts (2013) on Estonian queer feminist artist Anna-Stina Treumund, the artist took her own life, after years of struggling with depression. In utter shock and deep grief, I posted a part of the text above on social media. An interlude in the thesis, it captures my memories of the moment when we first met at a three-day feminist workshop in a small coastal village in the north-west of Estonia. Through an ethnographic engagement with Treumund’s photographic self-portraiture, the thesis explored the role of geopolitics and visual arts in producing feminist knowledge about time, space, gender and sexuality. In the process, we became good friends; which as many feminist researchers know, poses multiple challenges for research. Interested in the margins, the interstices, the spaces in between, I wrote a rather experimental thesis, putting experiences, bodies, subjectivities, words, and images at the centre of attention, while never losing sight of context.