Reclaiming Queer and Trans* Deviant Practices as Creative Pedagogies of Care

When institutional and social systems of care and knowledge systematically exclude queer and trans* lived experiences, alternative practices emerge that sustain these perspectives otherwise.These practices are frequently dismissed as ‘deviant’, risky, or illegitimate, and their knowledge and forms of care are often devalued. This research focuses on two such practices: cruising, i.e. social and sexual practices in (semi-)public spaces such as parks, and DIY-ing, i.e. community-led trans* care for self-administering gender-affirming hormones.

Queer and trans* deviant practices challenge conventional understandings of care and learning while offering alternatives grounded in lived experience. Within fleeting encounters, informal exchanges, and embodied navigation, care takes shape through improvisation, negotiating risk, and collective survival. Learning emerges through attunement and repetition and becomes relational and situated.

This research reframes deviant practices as creative pedagogies of care: relational forms of learning and care grounded in shared experiences of marginalisation, resistance, and survival. They are creative because they emerge outside institutional support, operate in improvisational and experimental ways, generate alternatives to normative frameworks, and call for artistic inquiry that does justice to their embodied knowledges.

The sound of cruising; wetscape, video soundscape, Milo van der Maaden 2026.

Cruising as artistic research method

Cruising is not only a subject of this research, but also a method. It offers a way of moving through space, relating to others, and sensing what emerges in the moment. Through this approach, the research follows how knowledge is carried in bodies, gestures, rhythms, and atmospheres, often remaining unspoken, yet shared and felt.

Cruising becomes a spatial, temporal, and relational mode of inquiry. It allows different forms of knowledge to intertwine, recognising queer and trans* creative pedagogies of care as performative, experiential, and relational rather than fixed within disciplinary boundaries.

Queer Wisdom for Resistance, workshop in MAR: Becoming Reoriented, Milo van der Maaden & Jake Smit 2025.

Artistic practice as research

The research unfolds through artistic methods that generate, analyse, and share knowledge close to lived experience. These methods are organised into three approaches: multimedia experimentation, co-creation, and anarchiving.

Multimedia experimentation includes sound mapping, material tracing, and 3D scanning to engage with spatial, material, and sensory aspects of cruising and DIY-ing. Co-creation takes place through storytelling workshops, re-enactments, and site-specific interventions, where participants work with lived experiences and speculative scripts. Anarchiving focuses on zine-making, care mapping, and living archives to document and circulate knowledge in open and situated ways.

Across these approaches, writing, sound, performance, and collective creation are used to explore how care and learning are felt, practiced, and shared.

Autoethnography

Autoethnographic work traces personal experiences through journaling, poetry, drawing, and sound. Memory, movement, and spatial experience are translated into soundscapes and voice experiments, which function as both research material and ways of reflecting on embodied experience, positionality, and ethical questions.

Milo van der Maaden (they/them) is an artist, educator, community worker, and PhD candidate in Care Ethics within the Meaningful Artistic Research programme (University of Humanistic Studies and HKU University of the Arts Utrecht).