Queer Lit

Hold on to your pussyhats! The incredible Prof Susan Stryker joins me for this whirlwind through trans histories, nows, and futures, in which we talk about the power of narrative and affect in research and media and about what transness might teach us about possible ways of existing in the world. Susan shares entertaining insights from her ground-breaking publications and films, as well as the creative projects she is working on right now. We even get to hear about how she teaches a magnificent work of trans* literature we have discussed in Queer Lit episodes past…

Don’t wait for it! Listen now and follow @susanstryker, @lena_mattheis and @queerlitpodcast on Twitter, and @queerlitpodcast on Instagram.

Works by Susan mentioned:

https://www.susanstryker.net/
Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (Seal Press, 2017)
Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (with Victor Silverman, 2005)
“My Words to Viktor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (GLQ, 1994)
Changing Gender: Memoir, History, Manifesto (working title)

Texts, people and quotations mentioned:

Janet Mock
“The Woman-Identified Woman” Manifesto
“The Lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”
Patricia Elliot
Lacan
Žižek
Teresa de Lauretis
Hyperobject
Anthropocene
Anna Tsing et al. (eds): Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
Foucault
Christine Jorgensen
“Christine in the Cutting Room”
60 Minutes
Mike Wallace
Ornette Coleman
Wendy Carlos’ Switched-on Bach
Tape music
Shirley Clarke’s Ornette: Made in America (1985)
Free jazz
Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018)
Jack Sheppard
Mack The Knife
Three Penny Opera
Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Junot Diaz
Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke
Freud
Deleuze and Guattari
Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History and The Arcades Project
Berthold Brecht
Foucault’s Herculine Barbin
Jakob von Uexküll

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.How do affect and theory interact in Susan’s work?
2.How can trans* allow us to think about other systems (such as the state or the environment) in new, more open ways?
3.Are you familiar with any trans* figures from literature or history?
4.Which people from trans* history does Susan mention? Please pick one and find out more about them.
5.What is the special formal element Susan highlights in speaking about Confessions of the Fox? Can you connect this to her other thoughts on (media or literary) form and transness? How can the cinematic art of film cutting parallel transitions?

In this special treat of a minisode, you will get to meet one of the amazing architects of Lesbian Lives: Prof Katherine O’Donnell (University College Dublin), who is herself an activist, artist and academic. Katherine tells me about her research, the rich queer history of Cork, about colonialism and queerness in Ireland, and she reveals Fiona Shaw’s real name…

If you’re as intrigued by Katherine’s many interests and talents as I am, go and follow @Ka_ODonnel on Twitter and also click on @Lena_Mattheis while you’re there. Prefer Instagram? NO problem, we got you: @queerlitpodcast.



Texts and people mentioned:

Slant (New Island Press)

Edmund Burke

LINC

@linc_Ireland (Instagram) @LINCwomen (Twitter)

Fiona Shaw

Graham Norton

Irish Queer Archive

@irishqueerarchive (Instagram and Facebook)

Tonie Walsh

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts



Questions I am reflecting on after listening:

1. How do activism and research intersect? Can they even be seperated?

2. What makes the queer research community distinct?

3. How can I steal that painting of Fiona Shaw?

4. Which local queer archives can I explore in the future – physical or digital?

Do you know what it feels like for a butch? Join Dr Melissa Hidalgo (California State University) and me for a brief interlude between Lesbian Lives panels to find out. Melissa is interested in barbershops, pubs, sports venues and other typically male connoted spaces. She explores how inclusive they are for female, butch, and brown bodies and shares some of her own experiences of California vs Ireland. Hot tip: If you need better language to tell your barber how you want your hair cut, listen now.

Lad it up! Follow @DrBeerButch and @Lena_Mattheis on Twitter, and @lifes_a_butcha and @queerlitpodcast on Instagram, for more queer content and gay haircuts.

Texts and people mentioned:

James Joyce’s Ulysses

Davy Byrnes

Bloomsday

Melissa Hidalgo’s “What it feels like for a butch” Gay Mag (2019)

https://gay.medium.com/what-it-feels-like-for-a-butch-3ba9ded6f126

Roxanne Gay

Alfred Arteaga’s House of the Blue Bed

Melissa Hidalgo’s Mozlandia: Morrissey Fans in the Borderlands (Headpress UK, 2016)

San Patricio or Saint Patrick’s Batallion

La Virgen de Guadalupe

St Brigid of Kildare

Chris Abani’s Virgin of Flames

Cherrie Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart

Dungarees, monocles, vegan boots and carabiners: lesbian fashion historian Ellie Medhurst (Brighton University) is intimately familiar with all of these staples of sartorial Sapphism. In this minisode, Ellie, aka @dressigndykes, will teach you how you too can look like cool lesbian. Ellie mixes tasty tidbits from queer Japanese fashion history with DIY political t-shirts in an audio(visual) melange of goodness and if you are not following @dressingdykes on Instagram and @elliemedhurst on Twitter and Tiktok, what are you doing with your lesbian life?



Texts and people mentioned:

www.dressingdykes.com

Édouard Bourdet’s The Captive (La Prisonnière, 1926)

Seitō

https://dressingdykes.com/2021/07/09/feminism-and-the-fashioned-lesbian-in-1910s-japan/

Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree



Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. What are some ‘secret codes’ of lesbian fashion?

2. What can we learn about lesbian life by studying fashion and the history of fashion?

3. Ellie talks about gendered fashion in 1910s Japan. Which gendered twist does she highlight here?

4. How might queer fashion be relevant to queer culture beyond a desire to recognise each other?

5. Do you have a favourite queer fashion item?

Did you know most people start to transition before they decide to transition? Louka Maju Goetzke (Frankfurt Uni) shares research on transition practices, as well as all kinds of fascinating findings on transitioning, forming the desire to transition, and other activities surrounding gender. Louka interrogates the making and crossing of boundaries which produce gender transitions and the distinction which is drawn between gender transitions and other practices of gender. We also briefly touch on cis people’s gender affirming practices, only to arrive at the thought indeed, everyone might be trans.

Come and smash the cis/trans binary with @LoukaGo on Twitter and @queerlitpodcast on Instagram!

Text mentioned

Leslie Feinberg’s Stonebutch Blues

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. What is a transition?

2. Louka mentions the relation between desiring to become something and knowing that you are something. How does this relation play out?

3. What gender affirming practices have you encountered in literature? Are they always performed by trans* people?

4. A transition can take many shapes and forms. I invite you to reflect on your own gender journey and be kind to people who are finding their way through theirs.

Warning! This episode will haunt you. Naoise Murphy (Cambridge University) tells me all about novels inhabited by spectral spinsters and Sapphic spirits and explains what these ghostly queers have to say about the carceral system and the colonial project. I am obsessed with (or possessed by?) Naoise’s brilliance and would recommend a listen, especially if you’re into Irish women writers.

There’s something strange in the neighbourhood. Who you gonna follow? @naoisemurphy and @Lena_Mattheis on Twitter and @queerlitpodcast on Instagram! (Doesn’t roll of the tongue though...)

Texts and people mentioned:

Elizabeth Bowen

Kate O’Brien

Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited (1942, originally titled Uneasy Freehold)

Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour (1981)

Soláthar díreach: Direct Provision



Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. How do ghosts relate to queerness? Can you think of a queer ghost figure from literature or popular culture?

2. How does race and racism figure into Naoise’s research?

3. Naoise talks about marginalised people being turned into ghosts. In which ways are queer people turned into spectres and what does this do to a group of people?

4. Please look up at least one of the authors or texts Naoise mentions and find out a surprising (shocking? haunting?) fact about them.

Did you know that a lot of the research on Anne Lister’s famously queer diaries was in fact done by fan researchers? Sarah Wingrove (Surrey University) explains why the fan community’s specialist knowledge and meticulous fact-checking should not be underestimated and how she herself got into Anne Lister aka Gentleman Jack. My favourite part: a new euphemism for masturbation, fresh from Miss Lister’s not so secret diaries…

Tiny mistake there in the terminology though: post-editing, Sarah informed me that Lister actually ‘incurred’ rather than ‘marked’ the cross, and that she died at 49. Thanks for the fact check, Sarah!

Want to stay on top of Gentleman Jack? Follow @saz_wingrove on Twitter to learn more. At least two puns intended. Also, @queerlitpodcast has an Instagram. Just sayin’.

Texts and resources mentioned:

Gentleman Jack

Anne Lister Birthday Week

https://www.annelisterbirthdayweek.com/

@ALBW2021 (Twitter) @annelister_bw (Instagram)

Anne Choma’s Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister

Eliza Raine

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, edited by Helena Whitbread

West Yorkshire Archive Service

https://wyascatablogue.wordpress.com/exhibitions/anne-lister/anne-lister-diary-transcription-project/

@wyorksarchives (Twitter) @westyorkshirearchive (Instagram)

Jill Liddington’s Presenting the Past: Anne Lister of Halifax, 1791-1840

Packed with Potential

https://www.packedwithpotential.org/home

@PackedWith (Twitter) @packedwithpotential (Instagram)



Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. What is the role of fandom in Anne Lister research?

2. How is traditional academic research similar to and different from fan research?

3. Have you ever turned yourself into an expert on something you’re a fan of?

4. Where can you access the diaries of Anne Lister?

Have you ever thought to yourself: how come radical feminism sounds so good but often tastes so bad? Dr Finn Mackay (UWE Bristol) is here to explain why that is. Come along to our Lesbian Lives chat to learn about female masculinities, tomboys and trans* mascs, and to hear about why Finn wanted to write a book that answers all the introductory questions people who are not queer academics might have about gender and transness.

Just can’t get enough of Finn? I can’t either, which is I follow @Finn_Mackay on Twitter and @drfinnmackay on Instagram.



Texts and people mentioned:

https://www.drfinnmackay.co.uk/

Finn Mackay’s Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Jack Halberstam

Westminster’s Transgender Equality Inquiry (Reform of Gender Recognition Act)

bel hooks’ The Will to Change



Questions you might want to reflect on after listening:

1. What are some of the masculine* identity categories that Finn mentions? Can you think of others?

2. Why might some people perceive the option of transitioning as potentially erasing other identity categories?

3. Do you have a good example (maybe even from literature) to explain why that is not the case?

4. Have you ever wished you were able to better communicate with people who have less of an understanding of queerness?

5. Do you have any strategies? Please do share!

Live like a lesbian: in solidarity. This little episode gives you a brief and desperately incomplete introduction to the happening that was the 25th Lesbian Lives conference. Under the magnificent motto “Solidarity!” so many wonderful talks, workshops, walks and connections took place, I could not even begin to claim an exhaustive summary. I do, however, have recordings from a keynote by the extremely funny and deeply clever Val McDermid and I get to share with you the visceral energy of wordsmith FELISPEAKS. You will also find out about the line-up of queer scholars whose brief interviews I will share with you over the next few weeks.

You absolutely must follow @felispeaks on Instagram and @valmcdermic on Twitter and if you have an extra like, why not share it with @queerlitpodcast and @Lena_Mattheis.



Most texts, places and people mentioned:

Val McDermid

https://www.valmcdermid.com/

Felicia Olusanya FELISPEAKS

https://www.felispeaks.com/

“The Thing” by FELISPEAKS

Philip Sidney

Edmund Spenser

Plato

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics

The Portobello Bookshop

@PortyBooks (Twitter and Instagram)

bell hooks

Olu Jenzen

Susan Stryker

Tzeli Hadjidimitriou

Skala Eressos

LINC

@LINC_Ireland (Instagram) @LINCwomen (Twitter)

Crawford Art Gallery

Cork LGBT Archive

@corklgbtarchive (Instagram) @CorkLGBTHistory (Twitter)

Orla Egan

@orlaegan1 (Twitter)



Questions I will be reflecting on:

1. What is solidarity? Where can we see it in literature?

2. How can I lead a more solidarity-oriented life?

3. What does ‘lesbian’ mean these days? Which parts of the label do I subscribe to?

4. Where is the line between scholarship and activism? Is there one?

5. How was this the 25th Lesbian Lives conference and it took me 31 years of living to go to my first one?

Call. Me. Mother. But what on earth does that word even mean? Dr Teagan Bradway (SUNY Cortland) takes us down the magnificent and multifaceted rabbit holes of queer kinship to chat about trans* motherhood, kinlessness, polyamory, race and kinship, queer kids, and the deep traumas and shiny possibilities attached to all of these. We discuss whether we really ‘choose’ our chosen families, how institutions intervene in our various relationships, and why the throuple makes for many more narrative possibilities than your average rom-com has to offer. From Netflix algorithms to pregnant butches, we pretty much cover it all.

Join the queer research fam today by following @Teagan_Bradway and, while you’re at it, why not check out @queerlitpodcast on Instagram as well.



Texts and people mentioned:

Bradway, T., and Ellen Lee McCallum, eds. After Queer Studies. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Bradway, T. Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Bradway, T. "Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form." PMLA 136.5 (2021): 711-727.
Bradway, T., and Elizabeth Freeman. Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging and Form. Forthcoming.
Weston, Kath. Families We Chose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Columbia University Press, 1997.
Renee Gladman
POSE
Paris is Burning
Marlon Bailey
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke University Press, 2009.
Lee Edelman
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are you my Mother?
Jules Gill-Peterson
Kate Davies’ In At the Deep End
Freeman, Elizabeth. "Queer belongings: Kinship theory and queer theory." A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies (2007): 293-314.
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet’s Dialogues
Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts
Harry Dodge’s My Meteorite
Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby
A.K. Summers’ Pregnant Butch
My Mama Wears Timbs: A Short Documentary on Motherhood & Masculinity by Ari Fitz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRgTLb5EbiQ&t=51s

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.What is queer kinship? Do you have concrete examples from life or literature?
2.Which critiques of the term ‘chosen family’ does Teagan present? Do you think relationships can be thought of as marketplaces?
3.How can kinship be used in violent and stigmatizing ways? Which examples of racialised kinship does Teagan give?
4.What does the term ‘kinless’ mean?
5.Please write a brief definition of either the term ‘nuptials’ or ‘throuple’ that mentions one primary text (as an example) as well as one secondary text.