Queer Lit – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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?    

Narratives can help us make sense of trauma – but what if these trauma narratives do not fit into preconceived structures of storytelling? Nora Parr joins me to speak about the role of narrative in trauma, in mental health and in understanding national, cultural and individual identity construction. Nora talks about how Palestinian literature forges its own narratives, why Palestinian literary history has so often been made invisible, and what genre conventions have to do with all of this.

Learn more about Nora’s work by following @noraehp on Instagram!

References:
Novel Palestine: Nation through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah (2023) by Nora Parr
Susan Lanser
Narrative Conference (ISSN)
https://www.thenarrativesociety.org/2024-conference-1
The Palestine Trauma Centre
https://www.palestinetraumacentre.uk/
Nakba
Road to Beersheva by Ethel Mannin (to see how some Arab critics received her work see this translation in the Journal of Arabic Literature https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341510)
Bab al-Shams (trans. as Gate of the Sun) by Elias Khoury
Children of the Ghetto series
https://rayaagency.org/book-author/khoury-elias/
Don’t Look Left: Diary of a Genocide by Atef Abu Saif, translated and published by Comma Press in Manchester
Ellipses (the first instance that really got Nora thinking is addressed in chapter 4 of the book Novel Palestine, page 77 has an image of the ellipses in question!) https://luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.168/read/?loc=001.xhtml
This article looks the problem of ‘eloquent silence’ from a different angle. 
https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0003/2018/229/7792/
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
J.M. Coetzee (writing on this is in a forthcoming chapter in Teaching Politically from Fordham Uni press, eds May Hawwas and Bruce Robbins)
https://www.gazapassages.com/
https://www.instagram.com/wizard_bisan1/
https://www.instagram.com/motaz_azaiza/
https://www.instagram.com/omarherzshow/
The Tale of a Wall by Nasser Abu Srour
Maya Abu Al-Hayat 
Memory of Forgetfulness by Mahmoud Darwish
Maria Sulimma
Trees for the Absentees by Ahlam Bsharat
Rights4Time
https://rights4time.com/nora-parr/

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. Throughout the podcast, Nora mentions how genre and genre expectations (for YA literature, science fiction, and serial narratives, for example) impact how we perceive narratives. Do you have an example for this?
2. What does Nora say about the temporal structure of trauma and storytelling?
3. What might the study of narrative have to do with mental health?
4. Which narratives can social media convey about everyday life in Gaza? Which examples does Nora give?
5. How willing are you to engage with narratives that are uncomfortable?

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?

A delightful episode with Mara Gold (St Hilda’s College, Oxford), aka the Sapphic Scholar, who talks to me about Sappho (duh…), homosociality, queer college life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lesbian love letters and surprise pubic hair in the queer archives. Mara is a historian, knows her way around Ancient Greece and Egypt, she works on and in museums, and get this: she has even worked as an archaeologist in the field. Best of all, Mara brings a refreshing and entertaining Sapphic perspective to everything she does – including this here podcast. Please note that the sound quality isn’t great but it gets better throughout the episode. Apologies!

People, texts and places mentioned:
Sappho
V&A Museum
Pitt Rivers Museum
HD
Elizabeth Bishop
Katherine Mansfield
Michael Fields
Mary Barnard
Anne Carson (fragment 168b translation)
Eve Sedgewick Kossofsky
Henry Thornton Warton
Sharon Marcus. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007.
If These Walls Could Talk 2

Need more Sappho on your socials? Follow Mara and me on Instagram and Twitter (@sapphic_scholar/@Lena_Mattheis).

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. What is homosociality?
2. Why does Mara study women‘s educational environment? How are colleges Sapphic?
3. Why does Sappho become so important at this particular point in time (end of 19th, beginning of 20th century)?
4. Which functions does Sappho serve in the queer community?
5. Could you comment on the reception history of Sappho’s work? What made this complicated?