LGBTQ+ History Month Panel: New Research in Queer Studies

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• Syeda Ali, Ferdinando Cocco, Connor Johnston, Aaron Muldoon, Marisa Tangeman
• Wednesday 21 February 2024, 19:00-20:30
• Gatsby Room, Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK, CB3 9BB.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact seniortutor-pa.

Celebrate LGBTQ + History month at this lively discussion of new research in Queer Studies, featuring informal presentations by five Wolfson College postgraduates speaking on the following topics:

• Syeda Ali (PhD, History), Contesting memories: Cultural representation of Section 28. The stories we tell about our histories and ourselves are important: Section 28 signifies a culturally iconic moment within queer communities, and has begun to receive increased popular attention. In this presentation, I deconstruct the basis for some of the widely held beliefs about Section 28, and propose the need to mainstream voices which have, until now, remained marginalised in the Section 28 discourse.

• Ferdinando Cocco (PhD, Film and Screen Media Studies), ‘Unnatural Vitalism’: Towards a Queer Theory of Animation. What does the queer study of animation look like? Due to its close association with childhood, Western animation has often seemed to serve the educational work of heteronormativity, leaving behind a canon with little to no example of transparent queer representation. In this brief presentation, I capitalize on the privileged relationship the animated medium is often said to maintain with the so-called “question of life,” to propose an ontological argument that surpasses the limiting frameworks of representation by seeking queerness not in the realm of representation but in the realm of medium specificity. What transpires is a partial overview of a road map for a queer theory of animation as well as for a revisionist history of queerness in the canon of Western animation.

• Connor Johnston (MPhil, English), Self-Harm and Agency in The Well of Loneliness. This project seeks to recuperate the darker parts of queer history, analysing the unusual and often upsetting forms of agency that were available in the early 20th century, specifically exploring self-harm as mediation, ascesis and transference in Radclyffe Hall’e 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness.

• Aaron Muldoon (PhD, Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies), Queer Cultural Memory in Literature, Film and Television since 1999. What happens to our understanding of sexual identity categories in the context of contemporary cultural production if we consider queerness as a genre? In this talk I want to propose that genre theory emerges in the contemporary moment as a particularly appropriate way of re-thinking queer culture and politics. With the proliferation of appearances of the category LGBTQ + in locations like Amazon’s online bookstore (as well as brick and mortar bookstores) and streaming sites like Netflix, Mubi and Prime Video, we are witnessing one way in which identity categories are being increasingly consolidated in the cultural sphere. Thinking about queerness and genre together offers a more nuanced way of working through what is often hastily summarised in terms of ‘assimilation’ or the commodification of sexuality. It also brings into starker relief the extent to which the work of early queer theorists on troubling the coherence of the sexualised subject has been abandoned in the popular imaginary—and, I would argue, by academia—and the way in which celebrations of sexual identity are entangled in the vast and complex process of market segmentation.

• Marisa Tangeman (PhD, Sociology), No Representation is Bad Representation: Deconstructing the Negative/Positive Binary in Bisexual Media Representation. While there is a growing body of research on the way bisexuality is represented in popular media, there is little published work on what bi+ audiences think about these representations. Research shows that bisexual people suffer from stigmatisation, discrimination, and poor mental health outcomes, and many researchers partly tribute this to the general invisibility and negative depictions of bisexuality in mainstream media. My research finds that while many media critics argue that “good” representations will have “good” effects and “bad” ones will have “bad” effects, bi+ participants all felt they were empowered by and found pleasure in a wide variety of contradicting representations. My research calls the binary of “negative” and “positive” bisexual representation into question.

This talk is part of the Queer Studies @Wolfson College series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Gatsby Room, Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK, CB3 9BB
• Queer Studies @Wolfson College

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