This seminar will examine cruising as an archival practice of the body that transforms public spaces into sites where queer individuals create alternative systems of knowledge, intimacy, and strategies of safety. Based on the essay Bil-Moħbi fil-Beraħ, published in Antoloġija Numru 1 by Aphroconfuso, this talk will explore how cruising extends beyond the erotic to forge intergenerational bonds, generate new ways of speaking, and negotiate queer existence within the constraints of the normative world.

The analysis will focus on how public spaces, traditionally conceived as heteronormative areas for family recreation or as former sites of British military occupation, are reclaimed as zones of queer intimacy that provide both pleasure and refuge from social violence. Cruising spaces also function as informal sites of informal education on disease transmission and protective practices, while surveillance and risk shape community dynamics through coded language and warning systems.

This seminar will also examine the connection between cruising and migration, considering how the presence of the "foreigner" in local queer scenes is not only built on relations of pleasure but also embedded within power dynamics—situated between personal intimacy and global influences, between the local and the imported, and between the loss of certain traditions and the emergence of new ones.

In conversation with theorists such as José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, and Lee Edelman, this seminar will investigate how cruising constructs a queer futurity not based on the heteronormative idea of progress but rather on fleeting acts of connection, gestures of communal care, and modes of survival that exist beyond the normative structures of the state and the family.

This is an ongoing project, and as part of this seminar, the analysis will expand to include cruising in sites such as Pembroke and White Rocks, alongside those already discussed in Bil-Moħbi fil-Beraħ. In doing so, the discussion seeks to offer a deeper understanding of how cruising in Malta has evolved across different spaces and how these territories are configured by the queer body in a world that seeks to constrain its visibility.

N.B. The Seminar will be held in Maltese.