Maré Tulio Jenzer

Maré Tulio Jenzer is a writer, performer and researcher. They earned a BA in Art History and German Philology from the University of Basel in 2022, followed by an MA in Critical Studies from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2025. There, Maré Tulio Jenzer also worked as a student assistant at the Institute for Art and Cultural Studies and was involved in the planning and implementation of the student-organized lecture series for the MA in Critical Studies. In addition to their studies, they have contributed to various (online) magazines, including cultural journalism, poetry, and prose. They have also collaborated on art-educational concepts at art and cultural institutions in Switzerland and Vienna. Maré Tulio Jenzer regularly participates in literary, film, and performance art projects and is also active as a drag king. Their dissertation project within the doctoral program “Cultures in Transformation” is dedicated to conceptions of the vampiric as a media-aesthetic strategy for formulating trans ontologies.

Dissertation project:

Bastardized Vampirism: Trans* Aesthetics in the Mediality of Film and Methods of Queer Monstrosity

Supervisors:
First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Nicole Haitzinger (Wissenschaft & Kunst / Universität Salzburg)
Second supervisor: Mag. DDr. Thomas Ballhausen (Wissenschaft & Kunst / Universität Mozarteum)
Third supervisor: Dr. Cat V. Dawson (Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin)

This dissertation project examines the “vampiric” qualities of the medium of film, which make it particularly suitable as an aesthetic means of expressing trans ontologies. The film works of American artist and filmmaker Jack Smith serve as the basis for developing and refining the research question. These works are analyzed in terms of their camp aesthetics and their inter- and transmedial aspects. The focus is on Flaming Creatures (1963) and the unfinished Batman Dracula (1964), which Smith developed in collaboration with Andy Warhol. The aim of the study is to identify a “vampiric” quality in Smith’s visual language – understood as an aesthetic strategy of cinematic inter- and transmediality that draws on forms of performance and drag, but at the same time reflects the vampire figure as more than a metaphor for queer existence. The project takes Sandy Stone’s concept of “gender as genre” literally and uses the vampire genre to develop alternative narratives that subvert hegemonic discourses – in this case, particularly those concerning aesthetics and representation – around “trans”.

Juliane Rebentisch’s concept of camp materialism forms the theoretical basis of this research project. In interaction with – and in contrast to – the Gothic sensibility from which the contemporary figure of the vampire arose, camp materialism enables a queer understanding of nature and culture, or of naturalness, art, and artificiality, that can be read as deeply trans.

At the same time, the art- and media-historical significance of the queer liberation movements in the United States in the 1960s is also examined, focusing on the question of the extent to which aesthetic forms of expression, which in retrospect can be read as trans* aesthetic strategies, already influenced the queer underground film scene before the Stonewall riots and the successes of the gay liberation movement. In doing so, it elaborates a vampiric dialectic that resists neoliberal appropriations of queer history through narratives of progress and politics of visibility. The project asks whether and why these radical approaches later lost their significance and to what extent they can be reactivated in current debates about the lack of political effectiveness of representation policies in the discourse on trans* aesthetics. The interdisciplinary dissertation project is located at the intersection of art, performance, and film history, media studies, and trans studies.