The Boy Study : Appendix A Thesis

Abstract

In this thesis I am organizing my thoughts on performing and my thoughts on boys.

I took the most outdated concept that I could imagine: Boys will be boys. I then studied and cross-examined the boys in their most natural habitat, in romantic relations, through dating them - in a quest to find out if there were any more progressive notations to be discovered.

This thesis is a collage, a collection of quotations, dialogues, texts and essays that are either included in, or circle around, a performative study on white cis-male adults, that identify as boys. It is investigating methods of positioning oneself, negotiating proximity and making statements, as techniques for performing. It plays with all tools at sight, from flirting to calculating. It neglects the English language as colonially and patriarchally neutral, and rather approaches it as a bit of a silly and rusty, yet malleable, tool, that bends to varying shapes and forms depending on the desires of the content. The Boy Study is an artistic project, in which I have during 18 months been dating 18 boys and written field notes on how the dates went. In this thesis, I share some of those notes, among many other notes, as an attempt to contextualize my artistic work and what I have learned throughout my studies.

Please note, that this is not The Boy Study, this is an appendix to it, this is a thesis. But you will get some of the love, loss, humiliation, tenderness, and dirty poems here as well.