Queer Lit

Join Nick Cherryman (University of Warwick) and me for a giggle and a bit of jolly gender jamming in this episode about drag, performance and pantomime. Nick (aka Ibi Profane) gives us some highlights of drag history, explains what posthuman drag might be and why even that is still gendered. Non-British listeners (and holiday enthusiasts) also get a brief intro to panto dames, why they can be so much fun, but also why they can potentially reinforce problematic assumptions about trans* people. With sparkling examples from Björk to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and a heartwarming story about a young queer woman, a drag queen and a burger, this episode will be the treat you need.

Texts, people and shows mentioned:

queer/disrupt
https://www.queerdisrupt.com/
“Ibi Profane's Dragged Through History”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PwjcKemYHk
Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto
JerBer Jones
Dragula
Hungry (@ishehungry)
Björk: Utopia, “Virus”, “Mutual Core”, Vulnicura, Biophilia
Andrew Thomas Huang
Stonewall
Marsha P. Johnson
Sylvia Rivera
STAR: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
GLF: Gay Liberation Front
Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clapp’s Molly House
RuPaul
Cheddar Gorgeous
Juno Birch
Ginny Lemon
Alaska Thunderfuck
Bob the Drag Queen’s “Suspiciously Large Woman”
The Queens of Perpetual Indulgence
Conchita Wurst
Jack Halberstam
Heather Love
JVN’s Getting Curious
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
Catherine Castro’s Appelez-moi Nathan
Jul Maroh’s Blue is the Warmest Colour

It’s behind you! So you better start your engines and follow @ibiprofane, @NCherryman, @queerdisrupt, @queerlitpodcast and @Lena_Mattheis on Instagram or Twittter. Aaaaahhh!


Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. Nick and I briefly reference Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and the term ‘posthuman’. Please find a definition and an example (this can be artwork, drag, literature, theory, popular culture or whatever you like) for the ‘posthuman’ and look up what the Cyborg Manifesto is all about.
2. Please create a little glossary of terms that relate to drag or being trans and write a very short definition (can be in key words) for each one. Example: “‘Transvestite’ is a term was historically used to describe people who wore clothing of a gender not assigned to them at birth. The term often conflates crossdressers, transgender people and people performing in drag.”
3. Can you think of an example of genderfuckery in a literary text?
4. What is a Molly House? Which specific one does Nick mention and where were they located?
5. What is problematic about pantomimes? What does Nick say about the differences between performance spaces and public spaces in this context?

Warm up your tarot deck and trim your undercut: Dr Xine Yao (UCL) is here to tell you all about femme invisibility, politics of unfeeling, queerness and race, occult queer practices, fashion and queer coding, ugly feelings, and so much more. Xine talks about her research on queerness and race in 19th century America, about race and professions in literary history, but also about her experience of working on these subjects in a Canadian versus a British context. If you want to think about queerness and race, or if you would like to learn about the subversive potential of unfeeling, hit play!

Selected works by Xine (http://christineyao.com) :
PhDivas
Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America
https://www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected
“Femmes in Science: Queer Erasure and the Politics of Dress in Nineteenth Century America.” Gender in American Literature and Culture. Eds. Jennifer Harris and Jean Lutes. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021.
“The Craft: QTPOC Tarot in Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim.” Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America. Eds. Kale B. Fajardo, Alice Y. Hom, and Martin F. Manalansan. Temple University Press, forthcoming 2021.

Concepts, texts and people mentioned:
#NoDAPL
Idol No More
Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion
Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Trans Child
Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings
Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy
Gloria Anzaldúa
Audre Lorde
Martin Manalansan
Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories/Theory of the Gimmick
Susan Sontag
Invert
Jane Austen
Bildungsroman
James Barry
Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness
Elizabeth Phelps’ Doctor Zay
Mammy trope
LGBTQIA2S+
QTBIPOC
Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim
Dusk II Onyx

Ready for (a) reading? Follow Xine (@XineYaoPhD) and me (@Lena_Mattheis) on Twitter!

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:
1.What does Xine mean by ‘unfeeling’?
2.List some prejudices attached to being femme. Why are they harmful?
3.Please look up Sianne Ngai and try to write a brief definition of ‘ugly feelings’.
4.How does Xine describe the respective (literary) histories of the white woman doctor and the black woman doctor?
5.What does Xine mean by ‘frigidity’ in this context?
6.We talk about the undercut as an element of queer fashion. Can you think of other queer fashion moments? What do they say about sexuality and gender?
7.In how far is tarot a queer practice?

In this episode, (the) Prof Terry Castle (Stanford University) joins me to discuss a corpus I don’t usually think about: lesbian content produced by cis-male authors. We talk about what’s great and not so great about these texts, which moments in literary history opened new doors for queer representation and why literature is such an apt medium to understand the fluidity of gender and attraction. Of course, we talk about many lesbian-authored texts as well and I am particularly grateful that Terry was open to talk about her own story and coming out.

Works by Terry mentioned:
The Professor and Other Writings (Harper Collins, 2010)
“The Lesbianism of Philip Larkin” (Daedalus 136.2, 2007)
The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (Columbia UP, 2003)
The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (Columbia UP, 1993)

Other writers and texts mentioned:
Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle
Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night
Ariosto
John Cleland’s Fanny Hill
Diderot
Balzac
Flaubert
Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin
Collette’s Claudine novels
Sue Lanser’s Sexuality of History
Diana Souhami’s No Modernism without Lesbians
Aphra Behn
Natalie Barney
Djuna Barnes
Juvenal
Martial
Sappho
D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow
Henry James’ The Bostonians
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sea Change” and The Garden of Eden
Gertrude Stein
Marcel Proust
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
Lord Byron

Ahhhh! We didn’t get to talk about Terry’s art! Check it out on Instagram and Twitter (@ThierryChateau) and give me a follow as well, if you like (@Lena_Mattheis or @queerlitpodcast on Instagram).

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening to this episode:
1.We briefly reference Terry’s book ‘The Apparitional Lesbian’ (1993). Please do a little bit of research on what the book is about and on what ‘apparitional’ can mean.
2.What is Terry’s favourite time in lesbian literary history and why?
3.Which types of female characters do we find in the 18th-century realist novel? Why is that interesting?
4.Terry talks about male writers producing lesbian literature. What are your thoughts on this? Please try to think through more than one position.
5.Why do writers go back to Ancient Greece to think about homosexuality? From what time onwards? What restricted access to texts?
6.Please comment on flat and round characters in Mrs Dalloway. Do you agree with Terry’s perspective?

Get the garlic, sprinkle the holy water, but please, leave the antiqueer racism out of my Gothic romance! Dr Maisha Wester (Sheffield/Indiana University) explains why Horror films are so interesting to study, what Brexit has to do with Zombies, why King Kong film posters reveal blatant racism, and why ghosts are not always gay but most definitely queer. Lusty lesbian vampires, Cat People (are those the same?), spiders, sharks, and Supernatural fan fiction: this episode has everything the tell-tale heart could want.
Texts, Films and Stories mentioned:
Dracula
King Kong
Le Fanu’s Carmilla
Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Family Guy
The Perfection
Roderick Ferguson’s The Nightmares of the Heteronormative
The Hottentot Venus
Raw
Cat People
I walked with a Zombie
Ganja & Hess
Arachnophobia
Jaws
Tendai Huchu’s The Library of the Dead
The Amityville Horror
Teju Cole’s Open City
Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”
Supernatural
The Haunting of Bly Manor

Not scared enough? Follow Maisha (@maishawester) and me (@Lena_Mattheis) on Instagram and Twitter.

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. In what ways are horror narratives and motifs political?
2. Why are queerness and race frequently negotiated in Gothic and horror stories?
3. Why are vampires often coded as queer? Which example for this does Maisha give? Do you have a favourite vampire?
4. What is the abject? What is Other(ing) in literary studies?
5. Open question: What do you think about the role of fear in the representation of queerness and race?

Warning! This episode will turn you into a Jules Gill-Peterson (University of Pittsburgh) super fan -- if you are not one already. Jules talks about her research on the long and rich history of trans childhood, reflects on the construction of childhood (and its harmful implications) in Western Imperialist contexts and also shares some of her new work on DIY transitions. In addition to talking about some of her favourite children in the trans archives, Jules speaks about her own experience as a researcher and about the production of self-knowledge. Turns out: labels aren’t everything and they surely aren’t everything they’re made out to be.

Works and People mentioned:

Jules Gill Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child
“Dissociation as Trans Method II”
https://sadbrowngirl.substack.com/p/dissociation-as-trans-method-ii?justPublished=true
Joanne Meyerowitz
Susan Stryker
Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education
Magnus Hirschfeld
Kathryn Bond Stockton’s Making Out
Female Mimics
Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors (and Stonebutch Blues)

Find out more about the incredible Jules on her website (https://www.jgillpeterson.com/) or on Twitter (@gp_jls). Or, you know, find much less interesting content here (@Lena_Mattheis) on Instagram or Twitter.

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. Why does Jules think that the concept of childhood is potentially more revelatory to think about than a definition of transness? How do trans children subvert hierarchies established through Western ideas of childhood?
2. Why are children unknowable? What does ‘unknowable’ mean?
3. How is the idea of childhood and immaturity used in a colonial context or to justify incarceration?
4. What does Jules mean when she says that “we really overinflate the power of signs”?
5. Have you ever known something about yourself despite not having a word to describe it? Can you think of an example for this from queer literature?
6. How can our perspective as literary studies scholars help us reflect on the production of self-knowledge?

Start spreading the news! Dr Davy Knittle joins me for a chat about what queerness has to do with cities, why heteronormative architecture can make life difficult for queer people and queer kinship, how poets desire cityscapes, and what all of this has to do with compulsory able-bodiedness and racism. We also talk about our dogs and why we feel the local park can be a great gay space. My favourite bit? Davy reading from Eileen Myles. I think you should hit play now.

Texts and people mentioned:

Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, 2011)
Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggeman, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 301-308.
George Chauncey, “Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public': Forging a Gay World in the Streets” in Gay New York, Basic Books, 1994. 179-205.
Julie Abraham, Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities (University of Minnesota Press, 2009)
Trans Wellness Conference: www.transphl.org (@TransPHL)
Thomas Hobbes
Calvin & Hobbes
Eileen Myles, “Hot Night” in Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991).
Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class, (Routledge, 2005).
Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008).
Patjim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia, Translated by David Hackston (Pushkin Press, 2017)
Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night (Simon and Schuster, 2020).
One of many studies on the racial wealth gap in the US: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/

Want to paint the town queer? Why not check out more of Davy’s work here (https://davyknittle.squarespace.com/) and follow me on Instagram and Twitter (@Lena_Mattheis).

Also, Davy was way too humble to mention this but many moons ago he had a conversation with THE Eileen Myles and you can listen to it here: http://jacket2.org/podcasts/not-me-ness-eileen-myles-and-davy-knittle.

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening to this episode:

1. How does Davy define the term city? Can you think of different ways to define it?
2. Please give an example of heteronormative architecture or urban planning from your own life. How does this example affect queer living? How does it affect other marginalized people who do not identify as queer?
3. What is Richard Florida’s gay index? Why is it problematic?
4. What does Davy say about the relationship between literary and urban studies?
5. Can you think of an example of a queer text, film or series that depicts urbanity as central to queer life?

In this episode, Dr Shamira Meghani (Cambridge University) talks to me about queerness and caste, about how imperialism shapes gender, about why people associate Islam with unfreedom, and about how literature can help us understand more about all of these intersections. They also explain what sexual dissidence means and why a tabloid newspaper suggested that the university that started the first MA programme on sexuality in Britain needed to be ‘disinfected’… Fascinating stuff and lots to think about! Give it a listen!

Books, people and terms mentioned:

Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence (University of Sussex, founded in 1991)
Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence
Alan Sinfield
Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World
Indian Penalty Code, 1860
The Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2018
Hijra
Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Indian Literature
Endogamy
B. R. Ambedkar
Bhramin
Dalit
Laws of Manu (Manu-smriti)
R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend
Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses
Ackley Bridge (Channel 4)
Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater
Ogbanje
Ben Okri’s The Famished Road
POSE
Mj Rodriguez

Oh, hi! Still reading? Then why not follow me on Instagram and Twitter (@Lena_Mattheis). See you there!

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening to this episode:

1. What is sexual dissidence?
2. How does imperialism relate to gender and sexuality?
3. What does queerness have to do with caste? What is caste?
4. Which non-binary genders are mentioned in this episode?
5. Why can it be problematic to think of other groups of people as unfree? Please try to think of further examples for this harmful ascription.

How do you get from wild theory all the way to wild swimming? By taking a deep dive with Prof Jack Halberstam (Columbia University) of course! Jack takes us where the wild things crawl and on the way, we discuss masculinities, the creative powers of failure, our difficult relationships to non-human animals, nudity and queer bodies, queerness, colonialism and capitalism, and, naturally, our favourite swimming pools. We also dip into some great queer texts, including but by no means limited to: gay falconry novels, animation films, eco-critical writing and non-binary theory.

Works by Jack mentioned:
The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy (forthcoming)
Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke UP, 2020)
Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press, 2018)
“Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark” (Places Journal, October 2018)
Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012)
The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011)
Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998)

Other texts, people and concepts mentioned:
Pinky and the Brain
Paul Preciado’s potentia gaudendi (Testo Junky)
Jane Bennett’s vitality (Vibrant Matter)
Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents
Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk
T.H. White’s The Goshawk (ferox)
T.H. White’s The Once and Future King
Glenway Wescott
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince
J.A. Baker’s The Peregrin
Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto
Colin Dayan’s With Dogs at the Edge of Life
Gail Bederman
George Mosse
Freikörperkultur
Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain
Jos Charles’ Feeld
Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox
Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Want to flood your feed with more ferox content? Check out http://www.jackhalberstam.com/bio/ and follow us on Instagram (@jackhalberstam @Lena_Mattheis) and Twitter (@Odo86700462 @Lena_Mattheis).



Questions you should be able to respond to after listening to the podcast:

1. Where does Jack see the potential in reading animation through a queer lens?
2. What can masculinity be? What is it not?
3. How does (im)maturity relate to queerness and binary thinking?
4. In which ways does Jack see the relationship of humans to non-human animals as highly problematic? What are his thoughts on Donna Haraway?
5. From this episode, what do you think Jack’s definition of queerness would be?
6. Please write down a few sentences or key words on what ‘wildness’ is and try to think of a text that you think could be classified as wild.

In this episode, Prof Chris Mounsey (University of Winchester) takes us on a wild ride: from meeting French philosophers as an undergrad, to the other day when construction workers gave him admiring verbal feedback for his (awesome) tattoos. And guess what, both of these encounters have to do with queerness and disability, or variability – the term Chris prefers. We talk about everything from passing as able-bodied or straight to why sexually explicit novels are so important. Although in the episode, I was rudely unable to remember his name, we also talk about Ryan O’Connell and his Netflix series Special. Chris then shares some important insights on the ‘curative narrative’ and provides some steamy book recommendations. Give it a listen!

Scholars and Books mentioned:
Queer People Conference (with Caroline Gonda)
VariAbility Conference
Foucault’s History of Sexuality
Peculiar Bodies Book Series
Teresa Michals’s Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals: Amputee Officers in Nelson’s Navy
Peter Radford’s Women Athletes of Early Modern Britain (forthcoming)
Routledge Advances in the History of Bioethics Book Series
Van Rensselaer Potter’s definition of Bioethics
Jean-François Lyotard
Luce Irigaray’s Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (Amante Marine)
Jacques Derrida
David Hume
John Maxwell
Nicholas Saunderson
Edward Carpenter
Virginia Woolf
T.S. Eliot
Penelope Aubin’s The Life and Amorous Adventures of Lucinda (1721)
Priscilla Pointon
Thomas Gills
Ryan O’Connell’s Special
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “A Habitable World: Harriet McBryde Johnson’s ‘Case for My Life.’” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 30, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 300–306.
Peter Singer’s “Ethics and Disability”
John Rechy’s Numbers (1964) and City of Night (1963)

Chris’s work:
Sight Correction: Vision and Blindness in Eighteenth-Century Britain
The Idea of Disability in the 18th Century
Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal,1600-1800
(Ed. with Carolina Gonda) Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700-1800

You want more, more, more? Why not check out Chris’s very own music at https://bearfffbear.bandcamp.com/ and follow me on Instagram and Twitter (@Lena_Mattheis).

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. At one point, Chris says that “variability enshrines uniqueness”. What does this mean? What is variability?
2. What are the three elements that Chris uses to describe variability?
3. What does Chris dislike about the term ‘disability’? What does that have to do with binary thinking?
4. How do queerness and variability intersect in Chris’ thinking?
5. What is the role of literature in studying queerness and variability?

Dr Elizabeth Reed (University of Southampton) is a cultural sociologist doing exciting research on bi-erasure, media representation and queer life-building. In this episode, Lizzie explains why bi relationships can be so difficult to describe, where we might need new language and where we might not, what and who queer families identify with and (most importantly) what soup dragons have to do with all of this. If that gets you curious, or if you’ve ever defined your identity using a wine metaphor, this one is for you.

Texts, Series and People mentioned:
Modern Family
The Fosters
Mae Martin’s Feel Good
Lewis, S. (2018). International Solidarity in reproductive justice: surrogacy and gender-inclusive polymaternalism. Gender, Place & Culture, 25(2), 207-227.
The Clangers
Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers Series
Schitt’s Creek
Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s graphic novel series Saga

Work by Lizzie mentioned:
Reed, E. (2020). Lesbian, bisexual and queer motherhood: crafting radical narratives and representing social change through cultural representations. In Imagining Motherhood in the Twenty-First Century Routledge.
Reed, E. (2018). The heterogeneity of family: responses to representational invisibility by LGBTQ parents. Journal of Family Issues, 39(18), 4204-4225. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X18810952
Hayfield, N., Campbell, C., & Reed, E. (2018). Misrecognition and managing marginalisation: Bisexual people’s experiences of bisexuality and relationships. Psychology & Sexuality, 9(3), 221-236.
Wood, R., Litherland, B., & Reed, E. (2020). Girls being Rey: ethical cultural consumption, families and popular feminism. Cultural Studies, 34(4), 546-566.

You want to build a queerer life? Start by following Lizzie (@ReedLizzie) and me (@Lena_Mattheis) on Twitter.

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. Which terms does Lizzie mention in addition to biphobia? How are they distinct?
2. What is queer methodology?
3. How does Lizzie study queer families and media representation?
4. In what form does Lizzie study Rey Skywalker and girlhood?
5. Why does Lizzie think queer families relate to cultural texts are not explicitly queer?