San José Museum of Art Assistant Curator Juan Omar Rodriguez will forge an intergenerational and transnational network of artists, curators, and scholars to explore the intersections of cultural production and queer politics in contemporary art, from the West Coast to Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Using cruising as a point of departure, this research project will examine interrelated questions of visibility and perception, architecture, public space, non-normative desire, nationalism, imperialism, globalization, migration, diaspora, and power. Inspired by Jack Parlett’s conceptualization of cruising as a perceptual arena where acts of looking are intensified and eroticized, this research will examine the incipient moments of cruising, where the fate of desiring queerly—whether it is expressed, whether it will be fulfilled—is contingent on a variety of factors, including the underexamined impacts of race, class, caste, and citizenship. This project will enrich visual arts discourses and queer political imaginaries and will also provide a platform and cohort to artists who are otherwise underrecognized in national and global contemporary art circuits.