A dog walks into a lesbian bar. I am not sure there is a punchline but there is definitely a podcast episode here. Listen to this chat with my lovely friend and colleague Maria to hear about the conference we will be hosting together, about queerness and/in the city, about seriality and sexuality, and about Maria’s fascinating take on TV and identity.

Follow @queerlitpodcast on Instagram and help us answer the question of all questions: Berlin or Cologne?

References to Maria’s work:

City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures. Co-edited with Barbara Buchenau and Jens Martin Gurr, the Ohio State University Press (2023).

“Surviving the City: Zombies, Run! and the Horrors of Urban Exercise.” Playing the Field II: American Studies, Video Games, and Space, edited by Dietmar Meinel. De Gruyter, 2022. 223-240.

Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television. Edinburgh: University Press, 2021.

“Defined by Distance: The Roadtrip and Queer Love in Alice Isn’t Dead.” Special Issue “Feminism, Gender, and Podcast Studies,” edited by Julia Hoydis. Gender Forum 77 (2020): 69-89.
http://genderforum.org/1596-2/

Die anderen Ministerpräsidenten – Geschlecht in der printmedialen Berichterstattung über Berufspolitik. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2014.

Other references:

https://queersecondcities.wordpress.com/

[email protected]

ALUS https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/

Zombies, Run!

Lieven Ameel (et al) Literary Second Cities

Scott Herring’s Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Jack Halberstam

Metronormativity

Stuart Hall

Raymond Williams

Angela McRobbie

How To Get Away With Murder

The Hundred

Maria San Filippo’s The B Word

House

Spiral Gendering

Ben Robbins

James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962)

The Last Black Man in San Francisco


Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. What is a second city?
2. What do cities have to do with queerness?
3. Maria briefly speaks about metronormativity. Please find a definition for this term and think about how it is relevant to urban/rural queer spaces.
4. What is seriality? Which kinds of narratives might this concept apply to?
5. How is seriality relevant to gender and sexuality? Maria speaks about bisexuality but maybe you can think of storylines in series that deal with other aspects of queerness?