Queer Lit

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 Ire...

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) melang...

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 distincti...

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 s...

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...

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 hav...

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 extre...

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 instit...

A PhD on Grindr? Yes, please! Dr Carl Bonner-Thompson (Brighton University) did just that and is an expert, not just on queer data, but also on queer geographies shaped by data and dating apps. Follow us into the gay matrix to learn about the everyday interactions of queer people with data, how data affects physical touch, in which ways tracking apps may reshape cruising spaces, and why Carl and I...

How do you decolonise your syllabus and create a queer book fest at the same time? Dr Vedrana Velickovic (Brighton) shares the amazing origin story of the queer literature festival ‘The Coast is Queer’ and tells us about the many authors, activists, students and creatives that shape the programme every year. We talk about our favourite activist bookshops, about exciting queer books from Eastern Eu...

Can you identify a bear with a fur-tive glance? Will a bearitone voice coax you out of hibernation? Join the cub! In this real-life (!) conversation, Dr Nick McGlynn (Brighton University) tells me all about bears -- generally speaking, a larger, hairier variety of queer men, who you may have seen flying the paw flag at your local pride event. Human geographer by trade, Nick has collected lots of u...

We love a good ‘both and’: both cake and ice cream, both dogs and cats -- Meg-John Barker, who is both extremely clever and very warm and kind! Meg-John is an activist, writer, scholar, therapist, and expert on everything beyond the binary. In this episode, as well as in their multiple graphic guides, MJ explains how rigid binaries harm our bodies, limit our minds and how many benefits life beyond...

How can we queer up the countryside? No need, says Joe Jukes (Brighton University), it’s already gay as folk! In this arcadian episode, Joe teaches me all about the dynamic nature of the countryside, about rural erotics and counter urbanization, and about how all of this relates to asexuality and non-sexualities in their research. If you want to learn about queers in the wild (and if you want to h...

Just in time for queer history month, the Queer Lit podcast and the CTSG, the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (Brighton University), have a special collaboration in store: Every Tuesday, you will get to meet a remarkable member of the CTSG and learn about their research and reading interests right here on the Queer Lit podcast. Our conversations cover topics ranging from the queer cou...

Do you know the secret butch nod? In this delightful episode, Dr. Amy Tooth Murphy (Royal Holloway) teaches me about the nod, the queer double take, and all the other sources of queer joy butch lesbians encounter when they brave the streets. Amy lets us enter this magical dyke world via the medium of oral history and explains why queer interactions often remain invisible to straight folk, why it i...

Get ready for the ultimutt dream team: Dr Sarah Parker (Loughborough) and Dr Hannah Roche (York) share their clever mewsings on queer pets and their keepurrs in this pawesome episode. Although a cat called Winky, a poodle named Basket and Whym Chow, the chow, are clearly the alphas of this episode, other Modernist animals and their human companions feature as well: from Gertrude Stein to Radclyffe...

This fine boxing day, I’m introducing you to my queer family: My partner Christian graciously agreed to crunch some candy cane with me for part II of the Holigay Special – and of course the reincats make an appearance as well. Together, we listen to messages from @ibiprofane of Drag & Panto episode fame, from listener @willowcabins, who shares her queer Carol-ling tradition, and from author @c.gem...

Light the candles, grab the tinsel! Our very first festive special has arrived! In this extravagant episode, I listen to all the fabulours voice notes you have sent in about queer Christmas and reflect on how great it is to be hohohomosexual (or pansexual, or ace or inter or queer in any way -- I'm just doing it for the puns). You will hear familiar voices from past episodes but also meet a lovely...

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 m...

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...

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....

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 thos...

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 abou...

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...

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 M...