Are you in the mood for queer joy and lots of panache? Come, come, listen to this episode about Virginia Gay’s Cyrano, an excitingly fun, gender-twisting play that you will love to the moon and back. Virginia talks about why this play resonates so much for queer people, how James McAvoy made her want to write it, and why theatre should always be hot, weird, funny and no more than a 90-minute experience.

To keep up-to-date with this beautiful production, follow @cyranolive and @thatsmsgaytoyou on Instagram. @queerlitpodcast is there too.  

References:
Cyrano de Bergerac
Fried Green Tomatoes
Park Theatre London @parktheatrelondon
James McAvoy
Jamie Lloyd
Steve Martin
Roxanne (1987)
Daryl Hannah
L’esprit de l’escalier
Jessica Whitehurst
Joseph Evans
The Handmaiden
Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith
Roxane Gay
Virginia Gay’s Cyrano (Spotify) https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Uayz56Nzmdekj1rry7rIP  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      Virginia’s Cyrano is what one might call a gender-swap moment. Can you think of other plays, rewrites, or adaptions that alter the story by changing the protagonist’s gender?
2.      We use three different pronouns for Cyrano in the episode. Which one is your favourite and why?
3.      Virginia speaks about several moments of metatheatre. Can you look up what metatheatre means and name one example?
4.      What does ‘l’esprit de l’escalier’ mean and how does it relate to writing?
5.      Virginia speaks about the complicity of the audience in problematic stories. Have you ever wanted to apologise to a character?
6.      What playlist (or play) gives you queer joy?

In part two of our festive end-of-year special, you will hear about queer families and mourning, gay novels and book festivals, cargo pants and Vaseline, and lesbians and travel. What’s the queerest thing you did in 2024? And how will you power bottom that in 2025?  

References:
Karen Tongson’s Norm Porn
Amber Jamilla Musser
Feminist Keywords podcast
Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival is a Promise and Undrowned
Mabel Mundy
Kerstin-Anja Muenderlein
Jack Strange’s Look Up, Handsome
Gay on Wye
Out and Wild
Pigeon Books
London LGBTQ Centre
Bluestockings
Liz’s Book Bar
Sweet Pickle Books
The Ripped Bodice
Gay’s The Word
Happiest Season  
Victor Garber

In part one of our festive end-of-year special, you will hear about queer weddings and Madonna, intersex dinosaurs and PhDs, crafting and queer culture, and how all lesbians do kind of know each other. What’s the queerest thing you did in 2024? And how will you top that in 2025?  

References:
Hollis Griffin
Libro.Fm
Ashley Herring Blake’s Make the Season Bright
Bridgerton
Material Girls
Hannah McGregor’s Podcast or Perish and Clever Girl
Jurassic Park
Theoryish
Hannah Ayres
Paola Medina-Gonzalez
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Mo Moulton
So Mayer’s Truth & Dare
listenqueer.co.uk
Blossom LGBTQ
The Female Glaze
Kit Schuster
Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries
Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism

Fierce femme dinosaurs, intersex embodiment, Laura Dern – it’s surprisingly easy to read Jurassic Park as a feminist celebration of monstrous queer bodies, at least when you have the magnificent Hannah McGregor by your side. In Hannah’s ‘bookiest book yet,’ we learn about lesbian dinosaurs, the ignorance of white male adventurers, and how and why they’re erotically eviscerated for their flaws. Not to be missed!

If you would like to observe us in the wild, follow us on Instagram: @hkpmcgregor and @queerlitpodcast.  

References:
Jurassic Park
Hannah McGregor’s Podcast or Perish
Material Girls
Theodor Rex
Whoopi Goldberg
Emmanuel Levinas
Laura Mulvey
Hannah McGregor’s A Sentimental Education
The Little Mermaid
Ursula
The Last Unicorn
Jen Sookfong Lee (Pop Classic series)
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Femme Shark Manifesto!
Terra nullius
Laura Dern
Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “What Were Dinosaurs For?”
Prehistoric Planet with David Attenborough
Ellen Ripley
Tales of the City
@hkpmcgregor and @ohwitchplease (Instagram)
Making Worlds podcast 
https://www.hannahmcgregor.com/
Agatha All Along  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      Why/How can we read Jurassic Park as a feminist film?
2.      What is the ‘monstrous-feminine’? How does Hannah speak about this? Can you find out which other scholar(s) we may associate with this term?
3.      What does terra nullius mean? How is this relevant to Hannah’s reading of the film?
4.      Lena calls Jurassic Park a queer ecology in the episode. Please name at least two reasons why this term might apply.
5.      What does Hannah highlight about Indigenous and decolonial scholarship in relation to Jurassic Park?
6.     How do you feel about Laura Dern?  

Have you thought to yourself recently: How come trans literature is having such a moment right now? Then this episode is for you. Sabine Sharp, editor of The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature (2024), is joining me for a chat about the significance of trans literature today, as well as its roots and legacies, especially in the 20th century. Sabine speaks about the difficult implications of transness as a symbol of futurity in science fiction and contrasts a personal connection with 1970s feminist science fiction to contemporary frictions between some feminisms and transness.

As you listen to this episode, we recommend transing transily through your house and following @queerlitpodcast on Instagram.  

References:
The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature (2024)
Material Girls podcast
Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer
Douglas Vakoch
The Climate Deniers Playbook
Rollie Williams
Nicole Conlan
Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot duology
Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries
Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender
Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time
Ursula LeGuin
Philip K. Dick
Cecilia Gentili’s Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn't My Rapist
Little Puss  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      How does Sabine describe the current moment in trans literature? Why do we need a handbook of trans literature now?
2.      What might the relationship between trans literature and ecocriticism be?
3.      Why is science fiction an interesting but also potentially problematic genre when it comes to depiction of transness and gender nonconformity?
4.     What is Sabine gesturing to when speaking about the relationship between feminist science fiction and transness in the late 20th century and feminism and transness today?
5.      What can we learn from trans literature?

How does your embodiment affect your perception and thus your writing? This is one of many questions Amber Jamilla Musser tackles in her most recent monograph, which builds on her brilliant work in Black feminism and queer femininity. Amber tells us how sensation and individual experience need to be part of an ethics of perception and why queerness is method that allows us to think capaciously and in connection with the body.

Come and marinate in the unruliness of being with us! Follow @queerlitpodcast and @a_jamilla on Instagram for more.  

References:
https://www.amberjamillamusser.com/
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014)
Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018)
Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024)
Queer Form (special issue of ASAP, edited by Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy Pérez)
Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021)
Feminist Keywords Podcast
Karen Tongson
Association for Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)
Jordan Peele’s Us
Ming Smith’s Flamingo Fandango (West Berlin) (painted)
Édouard Glissant
Ronak Kapadia
Stephanie Clare
Sharon Holland’s an other
Tiffany Lethabo King
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Audre Lorde
Titus Kaphar’s Pillow for Fragile Fictions
Audre Lorde’s Zami: A Biomythography
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s Big Girl  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      What does Amber mean when she speaks about masochism?
2.      What might an ethics of perception be?
3.      Amber speaks about how our bodily histories affect how we perceive. What is you bodily history?
4.      Amber suggests that queerness is a method in Between Shadows and Noise. What does this method allow Amber to do?
5.      How is knowledge embodied? Do you think about this when you read or write academic texts, which often suggest a neutral, disembodied perspective?

Have you heard of the wholesome queer Gothic? This is the cool new term that might just explain why so many of us were obsessed with monsters, witches, witches and vampires before we came out of the coffin, uhm, closet. Sarah Faber and Kerstin-Anja Münderlein join me for this spooky special to speak about their favourite Gothic books, games, and tropes, and about the amazing collection they co-edited. Tune in for seasonal reading recommendations and reflections on gender transgressions in Gothic narratives.  

References:
Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 2024)
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca
Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and The Scholomance
K.J. Charles’s Band Sinister
Vampire: The Masquerade -- Bloodlines
Bloodborne
Dark Souls
Fallen London
Castlevania
Sunless Sea
Doppelganger
Lara Brändle
Franziska Quabeck
Charles Dickens
Alycia Garbay
Grace King
Kit Schuster
Jennifer’s Body
Dracula
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher
Julia Armfield’s Private Rites
The Hays Code
RuPaul’s Drag Race
Heartstopper
Casey McQuiston
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Interview with The Vampire
Brad Pitt
Night Cascades
Hanako Games
Carolyn Dinshaw
Elizabeth Freeman
Kirsty Logan’s Things We Say in the Dark
Juno Dawson’s Wonderland (2020)  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      Why is the Gothic both a genre and a mode? What do these terms mean?
2.      What are typical tropes and features of Gothic writing?
3.      Which century might we consider as an origin point of Gothic writing?
4.      What is the wholesome queer Gothic?
5.      What are male and female traditions of the Gothic?
6.      What is your favourite kind of monster and why?            

Femme theory, bisexual butches, racy footnotes – the brand-new edited collection Queering Desire has it all. The brilliant editors, Róisín Ryan-Flood and Amy Tooth Murphy, join me for a chat about  what the book means to them and how challenging and rewarding interdisciplinary research on lesbians and sapphics can be. They dive into the multi-faceted contributions and how they matter to queer culture today and also generously share their personal experience in collecting the many gems that make up Queering Desire. Follow @roisinryanflood and @queerlitpodcast on Instagram to learn more!

References:
Holding Hands: Experiences of shame, pride and protest among LGBT relationship partners
Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship
https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/intimate-and-sexual-citizenship
Notches
Esther Newton
Sally Munt
Anne Lister
Les Feinberg
Billie Eilish
Charli XCX
Eleanor Medhurst
Sarah Joy Ford
Susan Stryker
Rosalind Gill
Kimberley Mather
Mie Astrup Jensen
El. Reid-Buckley
Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki
Liz Millward
Marie Lou Duret
Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain #
Ken Plummer
Agnes
Ella Ben Hagai
Dominique Adams-Santos
Skala Eressos
Sappho
Sadie Lee
Libro Levi Bridgeman’s The Butch Monologues
Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinities
Ladies of Llangollen
José Esteban Muñoz
K. Allison Hammer
Gay’s The Word
Esther Newton’s My Butch Career
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold
Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (The Price of Salt)
The Talented Mr Ripley
Andrew Scott Alfred
Hitchcock Strangers on a Train
Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men
Grace Ellis’ Flung out of Space  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      The editors speak a lot about interdisciplinarity and their respective backgrounds in the humanities and in sociology. Which challenges and benefits of working across disciplines do they mention? Can you think of others?
2.      Another important thread is queerness across different generations. How do you experience queer kinship across generations? What do you think the term ‘queer lineage’ might mean?
3.      What might femme theory be? Please look up the term and see what you find.
4.      What do the editors say about online and physical queer space?
5.      Which essay of Queering Desire are you going to read first and why?  

Get ready, queer language enthusiasts and trans literature francophiles! In another spontaneous recording from Lesvos, Mélie Boltz Nasr aka May tells us all about their genderbending fairy tale collection for adult readers. We also speak about feminist fonts, French grammar and how queering language is not just an activist aim but also a beautiful creative practice. To learn more about May, follow them on Instagram and check out @queerlitpodcast while you’re there.  

References:
Skala Eressos
Sappho
Contes D’Un Autre Bois
https://www.editions-ixe.fr/catalogue/contes-dun-autre-bois/
Charles Perrault
Grimm brothers
Walt Disney
Hassan Abdulrazzak’s Laila Pines For The Wolf
https://medium.com/@abdulrazzak/laila-pines-for-the-wolf-3710e81ebbd0
Éditions iXe
Bye Bye Binary
https://typotheque.genderfluid.space/fr
@bye.byebinary
BBB Baskervvol
Glyph
Alpheratz
Ursula Le Guin “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” 
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-is-gender-necessary-redux
Aesop
Lettre Aux Copaines 
https://lettre-aux-copaines.kessel.media/posts  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      What might the political framework of your favourite fairy tale be?
2.      Have you ever used an inclusive font? What do you think of this idea?
3.      What is an example of feminist grammar in your native language?
4.      Do you think nonbinary language is political? What is its place in creative practice?
5.      If you were to invent a nonbinary font, what would it be called?    

Guess who I ran into on the beautiful island of Lesvos: Karen McLeod, author of the amazing memoir Lifting Off. Karen sat down with me at Ohana Saloon, a queer-owned beach bar in Skala Eressos, and told me about her performance art, about working as aircrew as a queer woman, experiences with addiction, and about a new Lesvos-related book she is just starting to write…

Warning for the noise-sensitive: you will be able to hear the ocean, the wind, and the many, many lesbians.


Learn more about Karen’s work on Instagram @therealkarenmcleod and see @queerlitpodcast for our newest episodes.  

References: 
Out and Wild
Barbara Brownskirt
Lifting Off
In Search of a Missing Eyelash
Muswell Press
The Bookseller Crow
Cindy Sherman
Section 28
Polari
Shirley Valentine
The Short Tall Letter 
https://karenmcleod.substack.com/
Julia Darling’s Crocodile Soup
Jackie Kay
Stella Duffy  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      We are recording in Skala Eressos, which has a close connection to Lesbian poet Sappho. Why not take a moment to read more about Sappho right now?
2.      Karen begins by speaking about her experience of not being able to be out at work. Do you ever have to hide parts of yourself, based on where you are and who you interact with?
3.      Karen briefly mentions Section 28. If you are not familiar, please look up what this term means in the context of the United Kingdom and homophobic legislation.
4.      Karen and I speak about how amazing intergenerational queer spaces are. Do you share that experience? Why do you think different age groups can learn from one another, especially in an LGBTQIA2S+ context?