Sexuality in Popular Culture

Sexuality in Popular Culture 16:00-16:45 — ‘An endless procession of them, from all times’: The Making of Queer History in Pop Culture Films (facilitated by Dr Ina Linge) The recent film The Danish Girl (2015) takes as its subject the historical transgender character, Lili Elbe, and re-packages LGBT history and transgender identity in a popular and Oscar-winning Hollywood film production. In this workshop, we will explore how popular film and TV can present or even create queer history. How do they represent aspects of queer history that might appear odd or out of touch to us today? How is history re-moulded to accommodate changing understandings of gender and sexuality? And in this attempt to popularise knowledge of queer history, what is lost? In this workshop, we will focus on one particular aspect of queer history, namely the medico-scientific discourse of sexology, which sought to understand gender and sexual identity and diversity in the early twentieth century. Together, we will take a look at the encounter between queer protagonists and sexologists in two films and one TV series: Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919), The Danish Girl (2015), and Transparent (2014–present). In its heyday in the 1910s and 1920s, sexology was an emerging popular scientific movement seeking to show that gender and sexual variation have historical validity. Today, the history of sexology itself has become an important feature in current debates about gender as we once again turn to LGBT history in contemporary films. This workshop will investigate how these films uncover, adapt and create LGBT history, how gender is historically constructed and how historical constructions of gender shape contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality. 16:45-17:30 — Queer Playlists (facilitated by Dr Tom Smith) The shooting at Pulse in Orlando in June 2016 revealed how urgent the struggle still is for full equality and acceptance of non- straight sexualities. It’s no accident that last year’s most deadly hate crime against queer individuals was in an LGBT nightclub. Across the world, people tweeted their memories of LGBT clubs or went out to local clubs in an act of protest. Orlando reminds us of the importance of the nightclub as a place where society’s norms are relaxed and queer communities are formed, surrounded by low lighting and loud music. Popular music has long been one way for people to define their identities or communities. Since the advent of recording technology, music itself has often become the single factor defining a particular group: mods and rockers, punks, moshers or grungers, indie kids, ravers and so on. In this workshop, we will think about what role popular music plays today in forming communities, and particularly queer communities. One common concept is the ‘gay icon’: Madonna, Cher, Prince, David Bowie, Kylie, Lady Gaga and others have long been staples of the queer pop scene. What makes their music queer: is it just their image or is their music itself somehow queer? Does music make queer communities, or do existing queer communities seek out music to unite around? The forms of popular music that we associate with queer communities seem to be different between cultures too: R&B seems to play more of a role in mainstream queer culture in the US than it does in the UK, and techno plays more of a role in Germany than in the English-speaking world. What might the reasons for this be? And does looking at music perhaps point towards problems with the idea of ‘mainstream queer culture’? 17:30-18:15 — Multiple Erasures: The Portrayal of Queer Women of Colour Sexuality in Comics and Graphic Narratives (facilitated by Dr Monalesia Earle) In the last forty years, comics and graphic narratives have broken into mainstream culture. Yet queer women of colour remain largely invisible (or stereotyped) in the genre. Struggling against multiple erasures (as women, as women of colour, and as lesbians), our concerns are subsumed into larger (and typically white-centric) homo- and hetero-normative agendas. If we have any visual presence at all, the images circulating in popular culture nowadays are often contradictory and indistinguishable from tropes harkening back to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Portrayed as hyper-sexualised, predatory, unintelligent, drug addicted, lazy single mothers with multiple children, women of colour are at once castigated for the ills projected upon them by society, but also held to impossible standards of behaviour. Queer women of colour fare even worse. In this workshop I will utilise the multi-modality of comics/graphic narratives to unpack the sometimes explicit, but more often than not, coded stereotypes we see in images of queer women of colour in popular culture. I will attempt to demonstrate how sequential art can be used to unravel and challenge interlocking (and intersecting) oppressions, opening the way for the formulation of alternative ways of expressing queer women of colour embodiment and representation. The workshop will consider how the queer of colour body is ‘read’ across multiple and changing contexts. We will also discuss the benefits of using the ‘language’ of graphic narratives/comics as a way of critiquing cultural productions that persist in overlooking and/or misrepresenting queer women of colour. As part of the workshop, participants will get a chance to create their own comics to represent their understanding of gender and sexuality when it is bound up in race. 18:15-19:00 — Drinks .

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