Re-Orientating Gender (Studies): Feminism, Queerness, Trans* in Cultural Studies Today

Nonsecular: Premodern Lessons for Trans Studies

It is a commonplace in popular culture and political discourse that trans life is a new phenomenon, the byproduct of cutting-edge technologies and clinical pathologies that developed only in recent decades. The assumption that trans life is emergent has also shaped the field of trans studies, which seldom reaches back further than the late nineteenth century in its assessment of trans history. This talk asks what premodern studies has to offer our assessment of trans life in the present moment, focusing on how early modern thought understood transition through the lens of theology rather than medicine. I argue that the contemporary landscape of political transphobia is not meaningfully challenged by appeals to the secular authority of medical science and delineate the premodern theological imaginary as a resource for trans life in the present.

Colby Gordon is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Bryn Mawr College. With Simone Chess and Will Fisher, he coedited the first collected volume on the topic of trans studies in early modern literature for the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. His book, Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. He is currently working on a second book entitled The Trans Debate and the Jewish Question. For more information on Colby Gordon see https://www.brynmawr.edu/inside/people/colby-gordon.

Still Feminist! Being in Contestation while Practicing Political Healing

In a dialogue, Elisabeth Lechner and Greta Olson continue an intergenerational conversation they began with “#Feminist – Naming Controversies and Celebrating Points of Connection and Joy in Current Feminisms” (EJES 2022, open access). Still and ever more feminist, they are both actively engaged in politics that combat the cis-heteropatriarchy. Yet they acknowledge the ascendance of ethno-nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBTQIA+ tendencies and a public discourse that is increasingly dominated by outrage and a sense of aggrieved victimization. ‘Data rape’ and the current misinformation crisis are symptoms of what feels like digital capitalism on steroids. Although their analysis of the status quo suggests disenchantment, exhaustion and even despair, Lechner and Olson are united in finding hope, practicing political healing, and maintaining resistance in the polycrisis.

Elisabeth Lechner is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, where she also completed her PhD in 2020. Her research on ‘disgusting’ female bodies, body positivity and digital feminist activisms was published in academic articles and as the German non-fiction book, Riot Don‘t Diet! Aufstand der widerspenstigen Körper (2021). In November 2025, Lechner holds an International Diversity Guest Professorship at the University of Bamberg. On social media, she shares her research and third mission activities as @femsista. For more information on Elisabeth Lechner see https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/person.html?id=49234.

Greta Olson is Professor of American and British Literature and Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Diversity, Media, and Law (DiML) at the University of Gießen and was Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” in Bonn (2014, 2016). She is a general editor of the European Journal of English Studies (EJES), and the co-founder of the European Network for Law and Literature. Her recent book publications include From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect (2022) and Diversity Issues in the U.S.A.: Transnational Perspectives on the 2024 Presidential Elections (with Melanie Kreitler, 2024). For more information on Greta Olson see https://www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties/f05/engl/lit/staff/profs/gretaolson.

Male-to-Female Cross-dressing and Dis/eruptive Gender in Nigeria’s Digital Spaces

While LGBTQIA+ issues are freely explored in Britain and other Western societies but “frequently depicted as an unnecessary enterprise at best, as a threat to social cohesion at worst” (cfp), there is scarcely corresponding attention to such issues in British ex-colonies. Gender non-conformist expressions are seen in Nigeria and most parts of Africa as “taboo” (Enwerem 2023) and “Western import” (Amadi 2024) that has endured despite decolonisation. Recent legislation criminalising non-heterosexual expressions in the country has worsened the situation of non-binary communities. Nevertheless, an increasing number of young individuals have recently engaged in male-to-female cross-dressing and resulting identities to disrupt gender on social media. However, these acts have not been the subject of extensive research. Scant academic investigations on these digital practices have analysed them as laughable acts/feminist activism in a derogatory sense.

I propose to examine how selected digital subjects resist suppression by rejecting culturally apportioned gender roles/dress patterns. Specifically, I focus on a selection of social media performances of Idris Olanrewaju Okuneye (known as Bobrisky) and Daniel Anthony Nsikan (known as Jay Boogie). They are the most followed cross-dressers online whose acts have the broadest potential to influence society. Through close reading and cultural analyses, I explore their themes, modes of self-expression as well as the dramatic aspects of their performances. Dissenting from scholarly views that consider these online acts as Westernisation, I argue that the individuals under study are leveraging the insouciance of social media channels to evade the prying eyes of Nigerian authorities. Through male-to-female cross-dressing (a form of performance) and resulting non-conformist gender identity, they performatively break bias against non-binary expressions and resist homophobia. I conclude that these online acts are laying the foundation for a future of gender inclusion in Nigeria.

Bio

Dr Rowland Chukwuemeka Amaefula is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Graz (start date: 1st November 2025). His research interests centre on using diverse methodologies to propagate counter-narratives of sexuality, gender, race and culture in literary and performance studies. His articles have appeared in top-tier journals like African Studies Review, Research in African Literatures, TDR/The Drama Review, Feminismo/s, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, among others. Over the years, his research has attracted grants/bursaries and fellowship awards, including the African Humanities Program (AHP) of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and Georg Forster Postdoctoral Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation. He is currently on a Return Fellowship of the AvH Foundation at Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike. Dr Amaefula has also participated in several academic conferences on gender/sexuality and literary/theatre/performance studies.

https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/vernetzen/recherche-im-humboldt-netzwerk/einzelansicht/1222073/dr-rowland-chukwuemeka-amaefula

“Don’t say [I’m] ‘very pretty’; I’m attractive”: Between the Lines and Against the Grain in a Queer Vice Investigation in London, 1964

In 1964, police in London raided a suspected brothel in Holland Park. The madam, referred to as ‘A.’ but who identified herself as ‘Paula Clark’, was taken into custody, only to be accused of being a man. The reports of Clark’s intersection with the law make up, in and of themselves, a fascinating history. Yet these reports are the only available sources pertaining to the Holland Park raid. As such, they embody many of the issues facing historians of queer history of the twentieth century, insofar that they are not designed to recreate in faithful detail the microhistory of queer lives, but instead justify the actions of agents of the state whose vested interest lay in delegitimising those lives.

Sources, however, often have a habit of betraying their chronicler, and police officers could not deny the evidence of their own eyes. Thus, while the authorities painted Clark as a gay male sex worker in wilful breach of the law, those same authorities also recognised Clark as a transgender woman, and one whose socioeconomic situation led inexorably to her arrest in Holland Park.

This paper examinesthe liminal space between the objectives of state power, and the reality observed by agents of that power, with specific reference to trans and gender-nonconforming experiences of the European twentieth century. It argues that, by framing queer public life as vice, police and court officials often placed themselves in positions where their need to rationalise their actions against queer people affirmed rather than discounted their queerness. In turn, this means that a subversive (or queer) reading of such official records, while not adequately substituting for self-witnessing, offers an ability to reconstruct contours of individual queer lives, the communities to which they belonged, and the networks of support that often protected them from such state intervention.

Bio

Dr. Bodie A. Ashton [they/them] is a historian and Diversity Representative at the ZZF Potsdam, Germany. Their research focuses on queer and trans histories of twentieth-century Europe. Their 2024 article ‘The Parallel Lives of Liddy Bacroff: Transgender (Pre-)History and the Tyranny of the Archive in Twentieth-Century Germany’ won the German History Society’s inaugural Diversity & Inclusion Prize. They are the editor of The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity and Society (2024), the coeditor of the forthcoming Deviant Global Germany (with Ned Richardson-Little and Sarah Frenking), and the editor of the De Gruyter-Brill monograph series Transnational Queer Histories.

https://www.uni-erfurt.de/philosophische-fakultaet/seminare-professuren/historisches-seminar/professuren/globalgeschichte/personen/dr-bodie-ashton

The Unruly Body in Autobiographical Performance: Embodiment in Krishna Istha’s Sperm Donor Wanted (2024)

This paper examines the intersection of embodiment, performed autobiography, and the post-digital in Krishna Istha’s Sperm Donor Wanted (2024). As part of Istha’s M/OTHERHOOD PROJECT, the Netflix film documents First Trimester (2024), a series of live performances in which Istha engaged in unscripted on-stage conversations with potential sperm donors. These exchanges, framed as moments of intimate connection, explore queer family-making, gender politics, and human relationality, simultaneously fulfilling a real-life function – securing a sperm donor for Istha and their partner – performed in front of a live audience and turned into a Netflix production. The aim of this paper is to capture the ‘unruliness of body’ in these performances through embodied methodologies, arguing that bodies operate as a site of meaning-making beyond linguistic articulation.

Grounded in the premise that “language alone does not create connection; the materiality of the body possesses its specific agency” (Hashemi Yekani et al. 2012: 32; own translation), this paper integrates Rachelle Chadwick’s (2016) embodied methodologies to analyse bodies as driving agents in performed autobiography in Sperm Donor Wanted. Following Chadwick’s explorations, the paper incorporates, firstly, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “speaking body,” analysing how Istha’s narration is shaped by both structured language (the symbolic) and bodily rhythms, affect, and sensation (the semiotic). Secondly, employing an ethnopoetic approach to transcriptions of Istha’s performances, the study highlights the significance of non-linguistic elements such as rhythm, gesture, and spatiality in the construction of meaning.

The improvisational nature of Istha’s work – real-life conversations conducted before a live audience and later adapted into a Netflix production – renders Sperm Donor Wanted particularly well-suited for testing embodied methodologies. By positioning Sperm Donor Wanted as a site where performance, identity, and digital mediation converge, this paper advances the argument that embodied methodologies are essential for understanding how autobiographical performance extends beyond speech into the realm of affective and material connection.

Bio

Sarah Back is a doctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck (LFU), Austria, and serves as the PhD coordinator for the doctoral college “Borders, Border Shifts, and Border Crossings in Language, Literature, and Media.” Her research focuses on the intersections of authorship and feminist activism of colour in the digital realm. She is particularly interested in the physical manifestations of authorial discourses across different media and their impact on contemporary authorship.

https://www.uibk.ac.at/de/germanistik/institut/personen/back-sarah/

Queering the Menstruating Body: Undoing Binary Conceptions of Gender Through Cultural Artefacts

The menstruating body has long served as a key site for constructing and reinforcing binary understandings of gender in Western cultures. Historically, menstruation has been framed as a marker of female fertility, signifying the transition from girlhood to womanhood (Read 1-2). The bleeding body has been stigmatised as leaky, impure, and unruly—set in opposition to male-coded notions of physical integrity and rationality (Read 14). The womb has been pathologised as the root of emotional instability and hysteria (Showalter 7), while menstrual blood itself has been rendered abject, erased from visual culture, and replaced with sanitised blue liquid in advertisements for period products.

My presentation critically examines a range of cultural artefacts—from British medical writing to advertisements and menstrual products such as tampons and cycle-tracking apps—to explore how menstruation has been represented and instrumentalised to uphold a binary model of gender. These artefacts not only reinforce essentialist notions of female reproductive function but also subjugate menstruating bodies within a logic of biological determinism.

At the same time, contemporary menstrual activism and art disrupt these narratives by queering the menstruating body. Through representations of trans and non-binary menstruating bodies, these cultural expressions challenge the presumed alignment of menstruation with cisgender womanhood. By making menstrual blood visible and reclaiming the menstruating body outside the confines of reproductive normativity, these artefacts work to unsettle the gender binary and open up more inclusive understandings of bodily autonomy. This intervention is not only crucial for feminist and queer politics but also for broader discussions of reproductive agency, self-determination, and the cultural meanings attached to bodily processes.

Bio

Madeline Becker is a researcher at the Cultural Studies Department at Rostock University (Germany). She studied English Literature and Culture and European History at Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Germany) and at Bath Spa University (England). She has recently completed her doctorate. Her dissertation explores how nature, wildlife and environmental documentaries mediate environmental crises and their particular materialities. She has published research within the environmental humanities, material culture studies, and gender studies. Her current research project (Habilitation) investigates material artefacts and their histories, examining how they shape cultural conceptions of femininity, define its boundaries, influence the social roles assigned to women, and manipulate, regulate and control the female body.

https://www.iaa.uni-rostock.de/institut/mitarbeiterinnen/wissenschaftliche-mitarbeiterinnen/becker-madeline-m-a/

Tiresias, Hermaphroditus, Iphis: Literary Paradigms of Non-Binarity in the works of Kae Tempest and Ali Smith

The recent political backlash against gender studies as well as queer and trans* activism is driven by an essentialist insistence on a binary system of gender that aligns closely with an increasingly extremist political discourse unfit to tolerate diversity and ambiguity in general. And yet, gender fluid characters have always populated literary and cultural history. This paper proposes to investigate literary paradigms of non-binarity in the works of contemporary British artists and writers. In Girl meets Boy (2007), Ali Smith adopts the Ovidian myths if Iphis, Salmacis, and Hermaphroditus to represent the love story between Althea and gender fluid Robin. In Hold Your Own (2014) the writer, singer, and performer Kae Tempest uses the myth of Tiresias to project the different facets of a non-binary persona onto the timeline of a life story beyond heteronormative expectations. Although these myths center the transition between male and female bodies (Tiresias and Iphis) or the co-presence of male and female attributes in one body (Hermaphroditus), they seem to struggle with the idea of gender ambiguity, nonetheless. In their clear distinction between masculine and feminine traits as well as their specific plot construction, these ancient stories ultimately affirm rather than subvert binary concepts of gender and heteronormative sexuality. It is only in their adaptation and transformation into “brand new ancients”, I argue, that these myths can become literary paradigms suitable “to explain the things we made ourselves into/ the way we break ourselves into”, as Tempest explains the function of myth in their epic Brand New Ancients of 2013 (1). Exploring theoretical concepts from poststructuralism as well as affect theory and queer phenomenology, this paper aims to carve out the motifs as well as narrative and poetic strategies that translate ancient myths of gender transformation into paradigms of non-binarity in the writings of Kae Tempest and Ali Smith.

Bio

Kathrin Bethke is Associate Professor (Akademische Rätin auf Zeit) at the Department of English and American Studies of the FAU Erlangen Nuremberg. She holds a PhD in English from the Free University of Berlin and an MA in Comparative Literature from the same university. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled “Affective Appraisals: Shakespearean Correlations of Emotions and the Concepts of Value” and investigates the axiological dimension of emotions and other affective phenomena as they are represented in Shakespeare’s poems and play. Her current research is dedicated to elements of a transcultural poetics in contemporary diasporic literatures in English. Kathrin Bethke has taught English and Comparative Literature at Kiel University, Goettingen University as well as the Free University of Berlin. She has held scholarships from the Fulbright Commission, the DRS (Dahlem Research School) and the DAAD for research stays at Yale University, Stanford University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

https://www.angam.phil.fau.de/fields/enst/lit/staff/dr-kathrin-bethke/

Queer Space Romance: The Politics and Poetics of Love in Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit (2021) and Ocean’s Echo (2022) (with Jennifer Leetsch)

Everina Maxwell’s speculative fiction novels Winter’s Orbit and Ocean’s Echo challenge the legacy of the tragic queer ending by centering queer love stories within the genre conventions of space opera. Historically, queerness in both sci-fi and romance has often been relegated to subtext or accompanied by deathly narrative arcs,reinforcing a sense of inevitability and queer suffering (cf. “bury your gays”). In contrast, Maxwell’s novels, initially published as original and non-commercialstories on the fanfiction platformAO3, deliberately engage with romance and fanfiction tropes such as arranged marriage, forced psychic bonding, there-was-only-one-bed, slow burn, and hurt-and-comfort while foregrounding consent, agency, and (physical and emotional) intimacy. Whilst both novels recognize systemic power imbalances—whether through political alliances (Winter’s Orbit) or military control over the mind (Ocean’s Echo)— they refuse to conflate queerness with tragedy, offering endings that think queer love otherwise.

Maxwell’s work exemplifies the potential of romance as a genre to subvert traditional heteronormative structures, while also resisting queer exceptionalism. The author’s protagonists are not defined solely by their queerness but are instead shaped by intersecting identities, personal histories, and societal pressures. Situating Maxwell’s works within the broader traditions of queer romance and science fiction, this paper explores how her narratives employ and challenge genre conventions to depict queerness as both ordinary and expansive, as messy and joyful. Through the lens of queer studies, fanfiction studies, and romance theory, we examine how Maxwell privileges care over coercion and self-determination over tragedy. In doing so, we argue, Maxwell’s novels contribute to an evolving tradition of queer speculative fiction that resists despair while embracing complexity and plurality.

Bio

Amanda M. Boyce is a PhD student and lecturer at Trier University, Germany, with a main focus on transmedial power negotiations in commercial and fandom spaces. Their (research) interests range from science/fantasy fiction and film, and comics, to disability studies and queer studies. Recent publications include a chapter on “Fix-It Novels: How Commercial AuthorsInstrumentalize Fan Fiction’s Subversive Potential” in Fix-It Fics: Challenging the Status Quo Through Fan Fiction, edited by Kaitlin Tonti (Vernon Press, 2024) and an upcoming chapter on “Queer Journeying: Cross-Cultural Exchanges and Self-Acceptance in Japanese Travel Manga” in Anglo-East Asian Exchanges in Literature, Culture, and Media, edited by Eva-Maria Windberger and Judith Neder (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

https://www.uni-trier.de/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-ii/faecher/anglistik/departmental-branches-fachteile/literary-studies-/-literaturwissenschaft/amanda-boyce

“Through a glass, darkly”: Re-Orientating British #Tradwife Content through Domestic Noir.

With over 300 million views on TikTok alone, the trad wife subculture is influential and still growing – not just in the US, but equally in the UK, with figures like Cheltenham housewife Alena Kate Pettitt and her ‘Darling Academy’ website attracting a global following (https://www.thedarlingacademy.com/). Through curated internet and social media content, British creators using hashtags such as #tradwife, #tradfem, or #vintagehousewife share their views on aspects of domestic life and advice on home-making practices, e.g. cooking or interior decoration. These practices are presented not just as practical skills, but as emotional and aesthetic performances expressing a self-chosen, empowered ‘traditional femininity’ aligned with patriarchal values of submissive homemaker vs. financial provider, while rejecting feminist subject positions as overwhelming, exhausting, and inauthentic.

In my paper, I will analyse the intersectional ideals of home underlying British #tradwife content since 2020, when the hashtag trended in the wake of the Covid lockdowns in the UK. However, rather than pointing out #tradwife content’s well-documented white nationalist backlash against feminist values, I want to re-orientate the discussion through the perspective of domestic noir. This sub-genre of crime fiction presents the protagonists’ homes as an alienating, uncanny, extremely enclosed, and ultimately fatal setting for intimate partner violence, toxic relationships, and economic crisis, mirroring the overlap between feminist and anti-capitalist arguments. Proceeding from feminist studies of home as a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants, my thesis is that #tradwife content from the UK can be productively read as domestic noir: through its topics, elisions, and strategic editing strategies, #tradwife content implicitly performs questions of unpaid labour, economic dependency, and vulnerability. This perspective ultimately allows for a re-orientation of the issue of agency and gender within the home, where the allegedly personal choice to ‘simply be’ a homemaker is, always already, radically political.

Bio

Sarah Heinz is Professor for English and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Vienna, Austria. Before coming to Vienna, she worked at the Universities of Passau, Mannheim, and HU Berlin, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, NUI Galway, and the University of Copenhagen. Since her PhD on postmodern identity in A.S. Byatt’s novels, her research has been concerned with the contingent and shifting subject positions that a cultural context can offer and construct and in the ways in which such identities are represented, contested, and developed by works of art. This impacts her research within critical whiteness studies and intersectionality, which she has explored in contexts ranging from Ireland and Britain to Australia and Nigeria. Most recently, she has focused on ideas and ideals of home and home-making practices, e.g.in a project on the re-assessment of home during lockdown in literary reworkings of COVID-19.

https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/person.html?id=75024

Selma James and a Different Path for Feminism in Cultural Studies

Although Selma James – a core member of the international Wages for Housework movement, together with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici – lived in Britain during the formative years of British Cultural Studies, and was also married to C.L.R. James, a central inspiration for Stuart Hall and others, her influence on studies of gender within Cultural Studies remained peripheral. The founding text of gender related studies within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination from 1978, men6ons James and Dalla Costa’s The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community in passing, and Policing the Crisis discusses James’s Sex, Race and Class in some detail, albeit mainly for its relevance for ques6ons of ‘race’. But later studies failed to engage with the questions that James raised.

I want to take the example of James’s television production “Our Time is Coming Now”, which was produced for the BBC’s People for Tomorrow programme and aired in 1971, to show why James’ approach squared with the development of gender studies in post-1980 Cultural Studies. My argument is that her ac6vist and labour-oriented approach was mostly incompatible with the then dominant paradigm of analysing mainly representations of gender in literature, film and other text.

Finally, I want to take up the renewed interest in the work of James, Dalla Costa, Federici and others in the emerging field of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) to argue for a new way of attending to questions of gender in Cultural Studies. SRT allows to understand culture as functioning in a socially reproductive capacity within the logic of capitalism, and within this framework questions of gender and feminism, but also of queer and trans* lives, can be understood not as a problem of representation, but as a central issue in the reproduction of capitalist society itself. Consequently, gender can then be analysed not in culture, but as culture.

Bio

Christian Huck is professor of English and American Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Kiel and founding member of the “Zentrum für praktische Kulturwissenschaften”. His research currently focuses on cultural studies and media theory, naturecultures, Ireland and digital materiality. Publications include Das Populäre der Gesellschaft. Systemtheorie und Populärkultur (2007); Fashioning Society, or, The Mode of Modernity: Observing Fashion in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2010); Wie die Populärkultur nach Deutschland kam. Geschichten aus dem 20. Jahrhundert (2018); Digitalschatten. Das Netz und die Dinge (2020); and Cultural Studies for Troubling Times (2024).

https://www.anglistik.uni-kiel.de/de/mitarbeiterinnen/huck

Reparative Ghosts in All of Us Strangers

Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (2023) is a queer ghost story, in more ways than one. Based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Japanese writer Taichi Yamada, the film follows gay screenwriter Adam as he works on a script about his own past and meets ghostly manifestations of his parents at the ages of their deaths in a car accident when Adam was twelve. At the same time, Adam begins a romantic relationship with Harry, another lonely man living in the same tower block as Adam. In a poignant twist, the end of the film reveals that Adam has been loving a ghost all along, as Harry died from an overuse of alcohol and drugs after Adam initially rejected him at the opening of the film.

Through its nuanced engagement with parental and romantic ghosts, All of Us Strangers interrogates the reparative affordances of spectrality for queer people. Particularly since Derrida’s Specters of Marx, spectrality itself has been haunted by the expectations of invoking justice and accountability in the undetermined future for wrongdoings in the past. Haigh’s film, however, examines whether such expectations can truly be fulfilled, especially in a legacy of withholding empathy and compassion from queer people. Adam may have come to terms with the subliminal homophobic sentiments of his parents by temporarily reconnecting with their ghosts; yet, it is that same refusal to empathise with others on Adam’s part that triggers Harry’s own self-destructive tendencies and turns him into a ghost of his own who needs to be consoled by Adam after encountering his own corpse at the end of the film. While clearly advocating for empathy and reparation, All of Us Strangers thus asks us to what extent the concept of reparation itself is nothing more than a ghost chased (but never fully captured) by queer theory.

Bio

Dr Jonas Kellermann is Assistant Professor of British Studies at the Department of Literature, Art, and Media Studies at the University of Konstanz and the author of Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet: Word, Music, and Dance (Routledge, 2021). Interested in both early modern and contemporary literature, his research has appeared in journals such as Cahiers Élisabéthains, Adaptation, and Textual Practice. Currently, he is working on his second book project Queer Spectralities in Contemporary Anglophone Novels, for which he will begin a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London in the fall of 2025.

https://www.litwiss.uni-konstanz.de/en/british-and-american-studies/team/dr-jonas-kellermann/

Queer Space Romance: The Politics and Poetics of Love in Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit (2021) and Ocean’s Echo (2022) (with Amanda M. Boyce)

Everina Maxwell’s speculative fiction novels Winter’s Orbit and Ocean’s Echo challenge the legacy of the tragic queer ending by centering queer love stories within the genre conventions of space opera. Historically, queerness in both sci-fi and romance has often been relegated to subtext or accompanied by deathly narrative arcs,reinforcing a sense of inevitability and queer suffering (cf. “bury your gays”). In contrast, Maxwell’s novels, initially published as original and non-commercialstories on the fanfiction platformAO3, deliberately engage with romance and fanfiction tropes such as arranged marriage, forced psychic bonding, there-was-only-one-bed, slow burn, and hurt-and-comfort while foregrounding consent, agency, and (physical and emotional) intimacy. Whilst both novels recognize systemic power imbalances—whether through political alliances (Winter’s Orbit) or military control over the mind (Ocean’s Echo)— they refuse to conflate queerness with tragedy, offering endings that think queer love otherwise.

Maxwell’s work exemplifies the potential of romance as a genre to subvert traditional heteronormative structures, while also resisting queer exceptionalism. The author’s protagonists are not defined solely by their queerness but are instead shaped by intersecting identities, personal histories, and societal pressures. Situating Maxwell’s works within the broader traditions of queer romance and science fiction, this paper explores how her narratives employ and challenge genre conventions to depict queerness as both ordinary and expansive, as messy and joyful. Through the lens of queer studies, fanfiction studies, and romance theory, we examine how Maxwell privileges care over coercion and self-determination over tragedy. In doing so, we argue, Maxwell’s novels contribute to an evolving tradition of queer speculative fiction that resists despair while embracing complexity and plurality.

Bio

Jennifer Leetsch is Junior Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at University of Trier. She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Würzburg and has recently held fellowships and guest lectureships at the University of Melbourne, the University of Glasgow and Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi. Her first book on contemporary African Diasporic feminist and queer writing appeared with Palgrave in 2021, and she is co-editor of Configurations of Migration: Knowledges – Imaginaries – Media (De Gruyter 2023) and editor of a double special issue on Ecological Solidarities across Post/Colonial Worlds (2024).

https://www.uni-trier.de/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-ii/faecher/anglistik/departmental-branches-fachteile/literary-studies-/-literaturwissenschaft/jennifer-leetsch

Queer Cultures of Reparation 30 Years after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, or: How to Work with (and through) Dissent

Arguably, most of us scholars working in (British) cultural studies are liberal, intersectional feminists who despair in light of recent anti-democratic, trans- and homophobic developments in Western politics that restrict research in the humanities. Such times require an increased amount of ethical and intellectual labour and care from educators, critics and artists. We are convinced that we teach and work for and with similarly open-minded students. But what happens if it is precisely among this young generation that ignorant or even offensive opinions about (the legitimacy of) queer representation in cultural texts are expressed?

Taking two instances from my seminars as starting points, in this paper I want to develop how ignorance can be countered by reparative dissent. I use both the context of the seminar room and one case study, Charlie Josephine’s 2023 play Birds and Bees, as illustrations of my argument. In both, a seemingly safe space is disrupted and students need to voice (self)defense. In order to sketch the potentiality of such ‘self-defense’, I rely on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of ‘reparation’ and connect it to Judith Butler’s ethic of non-violence.

For Sedgwick, ‘reparative reading’ is a positioning toward a text (but also the world) free of preconceived notions and suspicion, which tries to practice non-dualistic thought and pedagogy. Such a caring attitude is difficult to maintain when an opposing opinion comes from a place of reluctance or ignorance. Reparative self-defense can occur in the heterogenous seminar room and is also represented in cultural products: the example of Josephine’s play, which takes place at an English secondary school, contains characters who are full of prejudices, insecurities and stereotypes against queerness. In both settings, ignorant statements generate heated opportunities for discussion. These moments of voiced dissent bring forth queer cultures of reparation that, I argue, it is a scholarly responsibility to foster in order to shake up hegemonic and heteronormative thought and relationality. In these moments students become aware of the necessity of being political subjects, and their ability to stand up for themselves and (fictional) others.

Bio

Heidi Lucja Liedke is Professor of English Literature at Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main. From 2018 to 2020, she was a Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of Livecasting in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre: NT Live and the Aesthetics of Spectacle, Materiality, Engagement (2023). Other recent articles cover topics such as queer ethics, depictions of reading, and failed endings and are forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Literary Ethics, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik and Performance Research. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Theatre Research International on “Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance” (2023).

https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/136371678/Heidi_Liedke

Weaving Protest across Time and Space:
(Inter-)Textile Practices and/ as Networked Feminism

In recent years, scholarly work on “networked feminism” (Clark Parsons) has gained traction with the unprecedented reach of digitally mediated global feminist movements such as #MeToo. The proposed paper adopts an expanded understanding of this term, historicizing feminist practices of which the network – as symbol and/or practice – is constitutive and focusing on often side-lined throughlines between earlier and current feminisms.Whilst both novels recognize systemic power imbalances—whether through political alliances (Winter’s Orbit) or military control over the mind (Ocean’s Echo)— they refuse to conflate queerness with tragedy, offering endings that think queer love otherwise.

Exemplifying this approach through a case study, the paper focusses on the craftivist textile practices of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981–2000), a series of non-violent protest camps set up at RAF Greenham as a reaction to the British government’s plans to store nuclear missiles at that location. Drawing on little-researched yet rich archival material from the Women’s Library at LSE, this paper traces the centrality of webs and networks for this group both in their symbolic function as part of its iconography and as a textile practice. The former is exemplified through the group’s logos bearing the female sign intertwined with a spider web as well as frequently reoccurring doodles of webs in newsletters, while the latter can be seen in the protestors’ use of yarn as a way of securing themselves onto gates and creating webs across the camp as part of their non-violent protest. Employing Michael Farrelly’s broader understanding of intertextuality that highlights the “networking function of inter-texts as a means of connecting social practices and elements of social practices” (369), the paper investigates inter-textile references – such as the group’s potential allusions to anti-Pinochet arpilleras – as additional ways of spinning feminist webs of solidarity and interconnection across time and space.

Bio

Tamara Radak is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna. After a PhD in Irish and British modernist literature and culture, she is currently preparing a monograph entitled Networked Media Practices in Feminist Protest Movements in Ireland and the United Kingdom, 1970-2020: Activism, Affect, Archives. Her publications include articles in, Theatre Research International, James Joyce Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English and Open Research Europe. She has co-edited the Special Issue Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance (TRI 48.1, with Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Heidi Lucja Liedke) and the collection Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (with Paul Fagan and John Greaney, Bloomsbury 2021). She is currently a guest researcher at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, investigating the intersections between digital methods and (post)digital activism in the context of data feminism.

https://ufind.univie.ac.at/en/person.html?id=33236

“Why are we like this?”: Seriality, Genre, and Queer Joy in Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper (2022) (with Melissa Schuh)

We explore the Netflix series’ Heartstopper’s commitment to complex storytelling on the basis of its multi-dimensional characterisations. Whilst queer representation in film has historically often culminated in a tragic fate, leading to well-known tropes and phrases, such as ‘bury your gays’, Heartstopper differs from many previous explorations of queerness on screen. In an implicit rebuttal of queer fatalism, it offers a multitude of character developments that refrain from relying on shock value and tragic sensationalisation for dramatic effect, dispensing with the stereotypical effects of showing queer suffering to generate empathy and yet, ultimately, discouragement.

The show represents queerness that exhibits multiplicity, as diverse kinds of queerness are represented, and non- exceptionality as well as intersectionality. Furthermore, the singularity of token representation is challenged by several characters sharing or identifying with various kinds of queerness. Significantly, none of the characters’ developments and characterisations are limited to their queerness and related storylines.

By connecting Heartstopper’s narrative techniques in developing its characters to queer studies and genre theory related to the Bildungsroman and romance, we investigate the potential of intersecting queer storytelling with established (usually heteronormatively coded) genre clues. Using concepts of serial narration, we demonstrate the unique possibilities of representing complex queer diversity on screen in a serial structure. As Heartstopper is a TV adaptation of a popular graphic novel series, we also discuss the distinct capabilities of each medium by the example of characters and storylines that exist only in the TV adaptation.

Bio

Anneke Schewe works as a researcher and assistant lecturer at the chair of North American Studies at Kiel University, Germany, whilst writing her dissertation on ‘The Post-Revisionist Western Film: an Intersectional Analysis of a New Hybrid Genre’ [working title]. She teaches literary courses on e.g. queer representation and frontier mythologies. Recent publications include an article she co-wrote with Melissa Schuh for the journal Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, titled “Exploring the Dark Side of Dark Academia: Postcolonial Criticism and Genre Hybridity in R.F. Kuang’s Babel”.

https://www.anglistik.uni-kiel.de/de/mitarbeiterinnen/schewe

“What future can you promise me?” Queer Temporalities in Doctor Who

In its recent seasons, British cult-classic Doctor Who has consciously included issues of gender and queer subjecthood. Through casting Jodie Whittaker and subsequently Ncuti Gatwa, the show departs from decades of cis-het incarnations of its central protagonist. Even beyond these more recent thematic emphases, the Doctor seems predestined for reflections on queer time and temporalities. Their status as the last surviving member of their species, the Time Lords, in conjunction with their periodical reincarnation resonates with both questions of queer futurity (Edelman) and trans embodiment (Halberstam). Nonetheless, queernessremains almost entirely unexplored in academic discourse on Doctor Who. The proposed paper seeks to address this lacuna and examines how imagining the Doctor as a (Black) queer subject allows the show to grapple with questions of queer temporality.

To provide a more nuanced analysis, the paper narrows its scope to a single episode, namely “Rogue” (S14 E6). This episode stands out because – through a whirlwind flirtation between the Doctor and the space mercenary Rogue – it provides the series’ most sustained engagement with queer desire to date. While the doomed romance between the two time-travellers might immediately call to mind Lee Edelman’s anti-relational polemic No Future (2004), the series’ overall ethos insists on futurity. As the Doctor states in this episode: “I have to be like this, ’cause this is what I am like. Onwards. Upwards. New horizons. Moving on.” Therefore, the proposed paper also pursues less avowedly negative ways of reading the Time Lord’s enduring commitment to time travel: Does the Doctor’s potentiality as a traveller of space-time as well as a member of a regenerating species provide hope that he will reach the queer future José Esteban Muñoz suggests we strive for? And what does the Doctor’s decision not to sacrifice his friend ‘for the greater good’ of the universe suggest about the value of queer chosen/found families?

Bio

Laura Schmitz-Justen (she/her) is a postdoctoral research and teaching associate at the Chair of British Studies at the University of Münster. In 2024, she was Visiting Scholar at the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Visiting Researcher at the University of Oxford in 2022. She submitted her PhD entitled The Poet as Lawgiver in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1820 in 2024. Laura is currently working on a postdoctoral project on women’s suffrage literature. Her broader theoretical interests include law and literature, feminism, queer studies, and disability studies. Her work has been published in English Studies as well as Journal of Lesbian Studies and she is co-editor of Feminist Perspectives on Law and Literature (forthcoming with De Gruyter, April 2025).

https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Research/British_Studies/people/schmitz-justen.html

“Why are we like this?”: Seriality, Genre, and Queer Joy in Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper (2022) (with Anneke Schewe)

We explore the Netflix series’ Heartstopper’s commitment to complex storytelling on the basis of its multi-dimensional characterisations. Whilst queer representation in film has historically often culminated in a tragic fate, leading to well-known tropes and phrases, such as ‘bury your gays’, Heartstopper differs from many previous explorations of queerness on screen. In an implicit rebuttal of queer fatalism, it offers a multitude of character developments that refrain from relying on shock value and tragic sensationalisation for dramatic effect, dispensing with the stereotypical effects of showing queer suffering to generate empathy and yet, ultimately, discouragement.

The show represents queerness that exhibits multiplicity, as diverse kinds of queerness are represented, and non- exceptionality as well as intersectionality. Furthermore, the singularity of token representation is challenged by several characters sharing or identifying with various kinds of queerness. Significantly, none of the characters’ developments and characterisations are limited to their queerness and related storylines.

By connecting Heartstopper’s narrative techniques in developing its characters to queer studies and genre theory related to the Bildungsroman and romance, we investigate the potential of intersecting queer storytelling with established (usually heteronormatively coded) genre clues. Using concepts of serial narration, we demonstrate the unique possibilities of representing complex queer diversity on screen in a serial structure. As Heartstopper is a TV adaptation of a popular graphic novel series, we also discuss the distinct capabilities of each medium by the example of characters and storylines that exist only in the TV adaptation.

Bio

Melissa Schuh completed her PhD in the English department at Queen Mary University of London in 2019 and is a lecturer in English Literature at Kiel University. She is deputy editor for C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings. Her research interests include English contemporary fiction, life writing, Brexit in literature as well as seriality and Modernism. Recent publications include a book chapter on ‘Serial Aesthetics and Autofictional Experiments in Rachel Cusk’s OUTLINE Trilogy’ in Critical Perspectives on Rachel Cusk, edited by Roberta Garret and Liam Harrison (London: Bloomsbury, 2024) and an article on ‘Exploring the Dark Side of Dark Academia: Postcolonial Criticism and Genre Hybridity in R.F. Kuang’s Babel’, LWU-Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, Issue 2 (2024), co-authored with Anneke Schewe.

https://www.anglistik.uni-kiel.de/de/fachgebiete/literatur-und-kulturwissenschaft/anglistik-1/mitarbeiterinnen/melissa-schuh

Managing Serostatus: Homonormative Adjustments in Recent ‘Post-AIDS’ Representations

In Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Culture of ‘Post Crisis’ (2018), Dion Kagan characterises the current phase of Anglo-American cultural productions that relate to the AIDS epidemic as “post-crisis”, which “describes the cultural re-scripting of HIV/AIDS from a state of crisis to one of chronicity” (15). Kagan retraces how pop-cultural responses to AIDS since the introduction of effective antiretroviral drug treatment in 1996 have veered from radical queer negativity to homonormative affirmations of reproductive futures.

This paper tests Kagan’s framework against two cultural texts released in 2021: It’s a Sin, a Channel 4 miniseries about the impact of the AIDS crisis on London’s queer community in the 1980s, and Derek Frost’s memoir Living and Loving in the Age of AIDS, which narrates Frost’s grappling with his partner’s HIV diagnosis and their joint effort in establishing an AIDS charity. I argue that these texts are indicative of three interrelated normative commitments of post-crisis or “post-AIDS” (Butler 2004) culture in the global North: i) a chrononormative orientation towards AIDS history that relegates negativity and denialism, but also hedonism and excess, to pre-treatment times; ii) an affirmation of “the neoliberal normative” (Kagan 2018: 13) that works through framing AIDS as an entrepreneurial challenge and assigns serostatus responsibility to individuals, rather than calling for structural solutions to the differential distribution of vulnerability; iii) a transition from subcultural and resistant practices of queer community building towards homonormative and homonationalist ideals.

As a final step, the paper will question the critical stance it assumes. Following Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson’s “invitation to think queer theory without assuming a position of antinormativity from the outset” (2015: 2), I will acknowledge the limits of queer critiques of normativity and gesture to the political potentials of adjustment and (queer) survivalism.

Bio

Ariane de Waal is a Lecturer in British Cultural Studies at Leipzig University. She is the author of Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama (De Gruyter, 2017) and has co-edited several special issues and edited collections in the fields of Theatre and Performance, Victorian Studies, and Cultural Studies. In 2023 she co-edited Becoming Ahuman, a special issue for the Journal for the Study of British Cultures with Mark Schmitt. Since 2021 she has been book review editor for the JSBC. Her research in Gender and Queer Studies includes articles on queer ecocriticism, trans necronarratives, and mediatisations of pregnancy and breastfeeding. She is a co-investigator for “Gender, Affect and Care in the Twenty-First Century British Theatre”, a three-year research project at the University of Barcelona.

https://www.uni-leipzig.de/en/profile/mitarbeiter/dr-ariane-waal