I

I

THE NOUVELLE

This text, which is my thesis paper, has served as the cornerstone of my artistic

research, crystallising both the form and the content that have driven my inquiry

over the past two years.

Conceived as a nouvelle—a deliberately concise, looped narrative—it condenses

performative extremes of chem-sex culture into a ritualized text that functions as

both ethnography and psychoanalytic rite desire reigns nouvelle.

At its heart lies the problematics of intimacy as infrastructure: how desire is

commodified, technologized, and made legible as capital in late-capitalist

predominantly gay male spaces. Through the alter egos “Jesus” and “Facundo,”

the text stages a dialectic between vulnerability and hyper-performance, exploring

how identities are constructed, sold, and ultimately consumed.

Theoretical frameworks from Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge to Debord’s

critique of the spectacle underpin the novella’s approach to spectacle and

invisibility, while Federici’s feminist historiography and Preciado’s notions of

gender performance inform its mapping of pleasure, addiction, and systemic

constraint.

This project has not only shaped my practice as a writer but also informed my

experiments in performance art and ritual: each reading, staging, or conversation

becomes an extension of the text’s “loop,” pressing participants to confront the

machinery of desire in their own lives. As such, Desire Reigns is both a source of

inspiration—a ritual text that invites re-enactment—and a methodological pillar,

articulating how narrative brevity and psycho-performative theory can generate

new modes of critical engagement.

In preparing for this exam, I have come to understand the nouvelle not simply as a

literary genre but as a liminal space—a threshold between writer and reader, form

and rupture, analysis and enactment. It is here that my artistic research finds its

motor: in the charged tension between theorizing desire and performing its

enactment, ever striving toward a praxis that unsettles both spectacle and self.