Abstrakt
This paper turns the cinematograhic ouvre of Wiktor Grodecki, US-based Polish-émigré, who was drawn back to East/ern Europe in the mid 1990 by the subject MSM sex work. His two documentaries (Angels but Not Angels, 1994; Body without Soul, 1996) and one feature film (Mandragora, 1997)-all titles reflective of the moral stance of the author-create an admittedly problematic and conflictual archive; an archive that reveals its complicity with dominant epistemic frameworks of homophobic homosexual panic, racialised and white nationalism as well as the stigmaphobic abjection of disability (HIV/AIDS specifically).
And yet, drawing on José Muňoz's strategy of disidentification and in a gesture of crip signing, I propose to re-read Grodecki's films as a performance of yearning, an attempt to open the space for critical reflections of the transnational dynamism of post-socialism, the global economy of debility materialising in the circulation of bodies, desires, fluids and viruses across the national/transnational borders, and through sex work, HIV and drug use/addiction.