Contemporary LGBTQ+ Screen Cultures Symposium

Geoffrey Manton Building, All Saints Campus, Manchester Metropolitan University

The Screen Studies Research Group is delighted to host this one-day, ‘in person’ Symposium at its All Saints Campus in Manchester.

The Symposium aims to facilitate discussion of contemporary issues around LGBTQ+ screen cultures with a focus on 21st century representations and expressions of queerness in film and other screen media.

We are delighted that Greg Thorpe, Artistic Director of Dublin’s GAZE International LGBTQ+ Film Festival will join us through the day. In the final session of the day Greg will screen some short films and talk about contemporary LGBTQ+ film-making and curating.

Schedule for the day  

Abstracts 

Participants 

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Schedule:

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Abstracts

Panel 1: 9:45 – 11:15

Jennifer Richards & Robyn Ollett: Title: “Do you feel held?” Queering an infastructure of Empathy in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019)

In Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (2005), authors Harry M Benshoff and Sean Griffin argue that Queer audiences have been drawn to the Horror film in particular as a way to access and reflect their sense of identity and community and to reclaim their own narratives. Ari Aster’s protagonist in Midsommar (2019), experiences a major upheaval in her life and begins a journey of enlightenment which appears to offer her an alternative to the trauma of a heteropatriarchal trajectory. Dani (Florence Pugh) is taken in by the Harga community as one of their own: at first the lifestyle and philosophical changes are disorientating, however, she slowly becomes enveloped, treasured, and held dear by the community. In this paper, approached from the dual perspective of Queer Gothic Studies and Fashion Studies, we explore the alternative infrastructure of empathy and kinship offered by the Harga community, tracing the significant design choices in the set and costumes used to narrate queer becoming via an immersive sensory feast. Following David Halperin’s definition of Queer Theory (2003) as an inclusive signifier that seeks to dismantle identities and categorisation, we will offer a reading of Midsommar which celebrates how the accumulation of bold embroidery, runic symbolism and floral motifs parodies structures based in capitalism. Flowers bloom and contract, colours scream in their saturation, and clothes engulf: Our paper will contend that the queer appeal of this film extends beyond notions of perversion and excess in its effective communication of social critique via visually arresting design. 

Meg Wilson: The Rise of the Lesbian Period Drama

This presentation is based on my current PhD research, which addresses the public discourses and theoretical tensions that proliferate around the “lesbian period drama” as an emerging popular subgenre. The category “lesbian period drama” surfaced in film journalism around 2020, notably in lesbian media outlets Diva and Autostraddle, as well as Vogue, Stylist, and Marie Claire. This naming came as a response to the concurrent releases of films and television series by major studios including The Favourite (2018), Gentleman Jack (2019-22), and Colette (2018). My research examines the cinematic and televisual registers through which the figure of the lesbian has become legible on the contemporary screen, through the narrative and formal conventions of the historical genre. As well as addressing questions of narrativity and sexual identification, this research accounts for the affective, spatial and temporal registers of lesbian desire within the period drama. I mobilise my readings of these films in dialogue with existing theories of lesbian (in)visibility in film studies, and the lesbian’s marginal status in film history. I examine the claim that a new cultural “lesbian imaginary” has recently begun to emerge as a tangible fantasy landscape generated by the historical genre, and map the terrain that marks its cinematic formations. Moreover, I interrogate the discursive shift that has enabled the category “lesbian period drama” to become nameable over the course of film and television history, accounting for earlier ‘precursors’ to the lesbian period drama such as Queen Christina (1933), Desert Hearts (1985), and Orlando (1992).

Hayley Charlesworth: Bloodlust, Beloveds, and Breaking Binaries: The Bisexual Vampire in 21^st Century Television

From Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampire has a longstanding history of `representing both sexual desire and abject otherness. As such, the vampire has served as a significant metaphor for queer sexualities on screen in television and film, such as the homoerotic potential of Louis and Lestat, Dracula and Jonathan Harker, or the ‘infected’ blood following a penetrative bite providing commentary on the AIDS epidemic in 1980s cinema. Yet, as LGBTQ+ rights have progressed in the 21^st century, and the advent of cable and streaming television has relaxed censorship, what becomes of the vampire when its subtextual queer potential becomes text? With growing acceptance of indisputably gay sexuality on screen, many recent vampire screen texts have relocated their focus to a heretofore less-widely understood sexual identity with the rise of the explicit bisexual vampire, particularly on television.

In this paper, I examine the bisexual vampire in three television series from the 21^st century: True Blood (2008-2014), What We Do in the Shadows (2019-present), and Interview With the Vampire (2022-present), and how this figure can be used to elucidate both the oft-debated definitions of bisexuality and the cultural, social and political issues facing the 21^st century bisexual community. I demonstrate that, as a creature existing outside the binary of living and dead, the vampire is perfectly situated to commentate on the binary-rejecting existence of bisexuality, its perceived liminality, and the negative stereotypical associations that others the bisexual from not only heteronormative society, but also from gay and lesbian communities.

Panel 2: 11:30 – 13:00

Lou Rich, Through A Bierotic Lens: BL and GL web-dramas’ intersections with Queer Digital Culture.

Produced, consumed, and translated within digital culture, Boy’s Love (BL) and Girl’s Love (GL) productions primarily take place in a space where producers and fans overlap. Post-2019 saw an explosion of international support and content creation surrounding BL and GL. This paper seeks to utilise the bierotic lens in such adaptations to rethink a framework of hetero/homonormativity and analyse how queer digital cultures play a role in consuming and disseminating such bierotic media. Specifically, when such adaptations are contingent on their political and cultural contexts yet through digital culture reach a transnational audience.

This paper first seeks to identify the importance of queer digital culture, both nationally and internationally, in the popularity of BL and GL adaptations. It will explore the evolution of streaming within East Asian and Southeast Asian contexts, and then internationally. A bierotic lens is introduced, acknowledging and utilising different gender and same-gender attractions to decode and critique attraction outside of the homo/hetero binary. Following, I select two hit web dramas, The Untamed (陈情令) (2019) and Pearl Next Door (2020) to discuss their explicit or implied portrayals of bisexuality and their reception. The paper considers how they subvert heteronormativity and traditional ideas of gender and relationships whilst considering cultural context during international dissemination. The paper reflects on to what extent does queer digital culture enable ‘translation’ of the work as queer from subtextual elements? Finally, the paper considers how bieroticism as a framework could inform future critiques of the BL and GL genres.

Kate McCullion: Digital Genders: Virtual Loci and Neo-Identities in Contemporary Trans Cinema and Visual Art

In the 21^st century, virtual spaces such as Twitter, Discord, and online video games have facilitated a flourishing of non-cis identities. By revelling in the radical alterity of digital avatars, contemporary transness has blossomed into a complex and nuanced network of identity formation outside of essentialist norms. These questions of language, colonial subjectivities, and the oppressive legacies of hegemonic ontologies presently intersect with other vital discourses, such as the ecocritical and indigenous approaches to cinema theorised by Anat Pick, Georgina Evans, Donna J. Haraway, and others.

In this paper, I intend to explore how the recurrence of digital-space-as-locus, such as in We’re All Going To The World’s Fair (2021)by the trans American filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, articulates the formation of new identities beyond the gender binary. The inherently fractured, corporeally unstable digital sphere presented in contemporary trans cinema and visual arts defies theorisations of a linear and mimetic body, destabilising transphobic beliefs in a unified and biologically pre-destined ontology. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, including Mary Ann Doane’s recent book Bigger Than Life, I intend to dissect how digitalist, body-hacked mise-en-scène, from contemporary films to music videos from trans artists like SOPHIE and Arca, destabilises hetero-mimetic visual codes of gazing and bodily construction, promising radical new possibilities for understanding ourselves and the future disentanglement of the bio-essentialist screen logics which have haunted queer and feminist film theory since Laura Mulvey’s ‘On Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’

Siobhan Scarlett O’Reilly: Queer Futurity in Music and Internet Culture

This paper will argue that digital utopic music cultures such as ‘hyperpop’ and PC Music (record label) are presenting new and different hauntological themes to internet culture and are therefore a less serious take on futurity and nostalgia than previous notions of ‘Lost Futures’. Previous art and music microgenres such as ‘Vaporwave’ expressed a utopian impulse through their creation of ‘no-place’ spaces on three interrelated planes: visual, acoustic and imaginative. Vaporwave ultimately summons these imaginaries of the past to the suggest the present is in turmoil. Hyperpop is a juxtaposition to this as it presents a queer futurity which is laced with humour and optimism. It could be considered that it is creating a ‘no body’ space for the future.

Genres such as Vaporwave draw their appeal from a deep ambivalence toward the globalized consumer culture of the 80s and ’90s, whereas as Hyperpop celebrates and mocks the finale of this consumerism during the 00s. 

Panel 3: 13:45 – 15:15

Tim Pattinson: Animating queer experiences of saying goodbye to Hong Kong

The individual lived experiences of LGBTQ+ Hong Kongers will vanish – if not shared – as the community relocates and/or navigates significant change, contributing to the historical and political erasure of queer voices and narratives. While recent hypothesis testing within Hong Kong concludes that vastly significant numbers of queer Hong Kongers are moving away from the territory due to social, cultural or political concerns, there is scant visual representation of this phenomena.

With animated visuals increasingly situated in the media we consume, animation and modern life are becoming more and more entwined. It is especially crucial to take into account animation’s growing cultural and political relevance, which may have social, cultural, and/or political impact on the local and global queer community at this time of intense turmoil in Hong Kong. It is equally crucial to acknowledge the notion that in itself – not merely at the level of narrative – the creation of animated visuals embraces and performs aspects of queerness. Additionally, as a gay British filmmaker living and working in post-colonial Hong Kong, it is important to underline the value gained by negotiating the intersections between (inter)dependent discourses of race and sexuality, in the understanding of self and society.

As a cis gay man, I am navigating these issues while creating a series of animated documentary shorts titled “Queer experiences of saying goodbye to Hong Kong”. This paper contextualises my theoretical framework and practice outputs for the story/concept production pipeline phase of this ongoing project.

Lee Campbell: Homo Humour: Uncovering LGBTQ+ Storytelling through Humour

This paper shares aspects of Homo Humour, a three-part project that I have curated since 2020 comprising of 1) a one-hour curated programme of artists’ moving image/film by gay male artists/filmmakers, 2) its discussion between curator, audience, filmmakers and invited speakers and 3) an interactive one-hour workshop which explores the gay slang language, Polari, the subject of one of my films included in the most recent version of the project’s film showreel.

Comedy historically comes from a queer identity defence, when it was harder to be gay in public, to be funny like the British comedian Kenneth Williams who used British gay slang Polari to communicate with other gay men covertly. As a means to express as well as emotionally protect, homosexual men have historically and to this day embraced and used camp, daftness and a range of comedy forms, Homo Humour explores the history of comedy as a queer identity defence, a means of expression and storytelling and the subversive and surprising ways that humour can be used on screen. Whilst LGBTQ+ film festivals such as BFI Flare contain programmes of LGBTQ+ humour as part of wider thematic programmes, Homo Humour responds to the growing interest in LGBTQ+ folk using film and moving image to tell their stories by focusing purely on humour. To share aspects of homosexual life through comedy. The project acknowledges queerness and humour and how the two can go hand in hand and with other things as explored through the films. It could be argued that a lot of queer films can become very representational and serious which why humour in terms of queer representation should be celebrated.

Sammy Holden: Trans, Camera, Action: trans and non-binary supportive film practice 

Trans representations have been much discussed in recent film scholarship. For example, Magali Perez Riedel’s 2022 edited collection, Transmedia and Public Representation: Transgender People in Film and Television includes essays from fourteen authors on a diverse range of trans representations on screen. Popular cultural criticism also covers trans representations quite extensively although there is no clear agreement on the effectiveness of current representations. In a blog post for Sight and Sound, Thomas Flew has suggested that representations on screen are useful to furthering trans support in audiences (2021), whereas in The Transgender Issue (2021) Shon Faye suggests media portrayals are inadequate in fully representing the expansive qualities of trans lives and identities. 

This paper begins from the position that any trans representation that is seen on screen has a creator, who may have particular aims or intentions as to how their film portrays trans people, trans lives, themes or ideas of transness. I argue that a form of social, ethical and moral responsibility falls on a film practitioner to consider the detail of how representations are formed at the point of their making. In the process of filmmaking, there is no earliest point to begin considering the impact of a trans representation. No matter the form of the representation, it will be impactful at the point of viewership by trans audiences. Drawing on research being undertaken for a practice-based PhD project about supporting transgender and non-binary film workers in the UK, this paper will consider filmmaking methods and practices at low and higher budget levels, film production cultures across industries and how film itself can be more trans supportive.

Panel 4: 15.30 – 17:00

Miguel Garcia: Queer Memory in Contemporary Spanish Digital TV: Trans, Disabled, and Non-Normative Identities

My paper seeks to examine interventions in the creation of queer memory through representations of multiple LGBTQ+ and non-normative subjectivities in contemporary Spanish digital TV series. The filmmaking couple Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (‘Los Javis’), bring LGBTQ+ representation and non-normative identities to the front in their series Paquita Salas (Flooxer, 2016; Netflix, 2017–) and Veneno (Atresmedia, 2020). Similarly, writer and comedian Bob Pop creates in the auto-fictional series Maricón Perdido (TNT, 2021) a retrospective narrative representing queer childhood and adolescence, non-normative bodies and disability, and casting a look back at the recent past to reassess the changes in societal values and representations in the twenty-first century. With these digital series, a wide array of marginalised characters, including transgender characters played almost entirely by trans actors, take centre stage, as do female and queer characters of varied ages, body sizes, social classes, races and psycho-physical functionalities. Read as forms of queer historical memory, these works aim to recover hidden or neglected parts of the past both by producing a sense of shared experience and through a process of revision, contention and re-insertion which carries a critical effect in the conflation of past and present values, ideas and representations.   

Ting Guo & Aiqing Wang: Beauty, Pleasure and Gender Performance: Translating Heaven Official’s Blessing into English

Despite the growing body of literature on queer media, the transcultural and translinguistic representation of queer sexualities is still an under-researched area in both screen studies and translation studies, with existing scholarship typically focusing on literary texts (e.g. Epstein and Gillett 2017, Spurlin 2014, Baer and Kaindl 2017) or subtitles (Jin & Ye 2022, Pleguezuelos 2018, Ranzato 2022). This work is often Global North-focused and text-centred, paying little attention to the specific queer subculture(s) involved. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how a Chinese danmei (Boy’s Love) anime, as a queer media text from the Global South, has been translated and reinterpreted in English. Through a case study of the English translations of 天官赐福(tiān guān cì fú, Heaven Official’s Blessing) (2020), a Chinese danmei anime series produced by Bilibili, it explores how the notion of ‘mei’ (sensual beauty) and homoerotic affection in danmei culture have been presented differently by international streaming platforms such as Netflix, Funimation and Bilibili as well as danmei fans, and how non-heteronormative sexualities, in this case, gong and shou (roughly analogous to top and bottom) in Chinese danmei culture, are re-interpreted and performed through official English subtitles as well as fandubbing. It argues that there are invisible barriers in the translation and dissemination of queer knowledge from the South to the North. Queer fans’ engagement with and appropriation of the existing translations not only disrupt the control of this knowledge by the media industry but also constitute part of their queer identity and enrich the local queer subculture.  

Agnieszka Piotrowska: Queer or Patriarchal?

There is a scene in the acclaimed film Tar in which its title character, the Lesbian orchestra conductor Lydia Tar (played famously by Cate Blanchett) takes her daughter Petra to school and confronts a girl who has bullied Petra.   ‘I am Petra’s father’ she says before threatening her if she continues with the bullying.  One could argue that the whole narrative of the film centres on Lydia Tar’s (patriarchal) ambitions for power. As such, her gender and even sexual preference becomes an irrelevance as she appears to replicate the abuses of other famous heterosexual predators such as Harvey Weinstein or Roman Polanski for example.  However, despite the towering performance of Cate Blanchett, the film has evoked profound criticism for its patriarchal representation of a lesbian woman in a position of authority. A real life lesbian conductor Marin Alsop went on the record saying she had been profoundly offended by the film  ‘I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian’ https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/01/11/tar-cate-blanchett-marin-alsop/  Both the film’s director Todd Field and its star and the cast denied any suggestions that the work might have been anti-female or anti-lesbian. The paper suggests that the introduction of the gayness of the main characters does not in fact contribute to the main narrative and appears problematic (as the story would work just as well with Lydia being straight). Is there a suggestion that her gayness contributed to her appetite for power?  Similarly, I will look at other representations of gay relationships in films such as the acclaimed Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2020) or Louis Guadagnino’s Call me by Your Name (2017) in which one could argue there are asymmetrical power issues in the main romantic engagements which get resolved by the re-entering of the traditional patriarchal systems.  Are the artists and the audiences unable to imagine a different way of being in the world or is the representation indicative of (unconscious) negative attitudes toward queerness?

Natasha Broadhurst Mediating empathy: the construction of spatial (sexual) intimacy in God’s Own Country

The depiction of space in God’s Own Country (Lee, 2017) has been characterised as ‘textured’, ‘poetic’ and ‘lyrical’, and the film is overwhelmingly praised for its meticulously detailed, empathetic expression of gay male romance. Yet, such abstract descriptors are rarely substantiated with precise textual evidence from the film. Using measurements and analysis of shot durations, repetitions and variations of shot types and scale, this paper explores the construction of spatial (sexual) intimacy in God’s Own Country. During production, Lee created a scrapbook of images, smells, sounds and textures that he used as a tangible exposition of his intentions for the film’s atmosphere and tone. I argue that this meticulous approach to the sensory configuration of space necessitates rigorous textual analysis in order to offer a precise account of the poetic formation of these elements.

Underpinned by critical scholarship of filmic texture and sensory realism, this analysis leads to a broader discussion of worldbuilding in relation to representations of gay men in 21st century British realist romance. The encouragement of sensory engagement is often interpreted as a mechanism for the efficacious formation of empathy and understanding. However, teamed with the romance narrative - that mobilises the gay ‘scrapbook’ and provides a further anchor for straight audiences - the powerfully evocative nature of God’s Own Country raises problems of homonormativity. Disengaged from gay politics and culture, and disassociated from non-normative locales, I suggest that there remains a conflict at the core of how to empathetically represent realities of everyday gay experiences without adhering to romantic assimilation.

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Participants

Natasha Broadhurst (she/her) is a second-year PGR in The School of English at The University of Sheffield. Natasha’s research is concerned with representations of gay male perspectives in contemporary British cinema. Probing questions related to queerness and masculinity within the national and formal contexts of British realist traditions, it grapples with the significance, and related implications, of representing gay men in British film.

Dr Lee Campbell is an artist, experimental filmmaker, writer and Senior Lecturer at University of the Arts London. Lee’s experimental performance poetry films have been selected for many international film festivals since 2019. He also has a keen interest in critical performative pedagogy and has published extensively also in this field. Recently, he published his first book volume, Leap into Action: Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art and Design Education (Peter Lang USA). He was awarded the University of Lincoln Best Practice Award in Promoting Equality in 2018.

Hayley Louise Charlesworth is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University in the Centre for Gothic Studies. Her research examines representations of bisexuality, biphobia, and bisexual erasure in contemporary supernatural television. Charlesworth has presented her research at Gothic and Gender Studies conferences in the UK, Ireland and Finland.

Samantha Colling is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Amongst other publications she is the author of The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film (2017) and has a forthcoming chapter ‘Feeling Like a Teenage Lesbian: the sex scenes in The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018) and Make Up (2019)’ in Screening Sex: The Sex Scene - Representation, Performance, Aesthetics, Darren Kerr and Donna Peperdy (eds). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. She is also currently working on a monograph titled Sex in Reality Television: 2000-2020.

Miguel García is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at University of Bristol. He researches contemporary Spanish poetry, theatre and film from the critical perspectives of Gender and Queer Studies. His recently published monograph Queering Lorca’s Duende: Desire, Death, Intermediality (Legenda, 2022) proposes a queer reading of Federico García Lorca’s later poetry, theatre, drawings and film script. His current research project examines the representation of adolescents and young adults in twenty-first-century Hispanic film and screen cultures, focusing on queer identities and on emerging Spanish and Argentinian filmmakers, mapping millennial Hispanic film and digital television within global screen cultures. Forthcoming publications include ‘Millennial Screen Cultures in Spain: Queering the Mainstream’, an article in the refereed journal Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, and a chapter in the edited collection Gender and Contemporary Television in Iberia and Latin America: Identities and Social Change (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Dr Ting Guo is Senior Lecturer in Translation and Chinese Studies in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Film, University of Liverpool (UK). Her research focuses on the pivotal role of translator in the reproduction and dissemination of knowledge. Her ongoing AHRC funded project “Translating for change: Anglophone queer cinema and Chinese LGBT+ movement” explores new ways to visualize subtitling practices by Chinese queer fans and how Anglophone queer culture has been translated into Chinese in films.

Sammy Holden is a PhD researcher and Graduate Teaching Assistant at Edge Hill University, based in the English and Creative Arts department.   

Kate McCullion is currently pursuing an MA in Film Studies at King’s College London with a Masters thesis focused on ecocritical approaches to tracing the development of Silent Cinema. Having previously studied for a bachelors in American Studies at the University of Manchester where she received the Henry Box Brown prize for her dissertation and twice received the Kaiser Prize for contributions in American History, Miss McCullion is interested in film-philosophy and how the structures and forms of cinema shape our perceptions of time, bodies, and landscapes. As a poet, she has written about trans identity and sexuality with her most recent work ‘The Ooze’ being published in the collection Trans Kink from Edinburgh’s Easter Road Press.

Andrew Moor is Reader in Cinema History and co-lead of the Screen Studies Group at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has written widely on British Cinema history and is currently working on an article on Francis Lee’s film God’s Own Country. He was one of the founders of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies and is editor-in-chief of its journal, Open Screens.

Siobhan Scarlett O’Reilly is a Doctoral Researcher at The University of Brighton. Her thesis focuses on the behaviours of nostalgic digital communities. She has an interest in Queer Theory, Fan Studies and Disability Studies.

Dr Robyn Ollett is a Lecturer in English Studies and Media Studies at Teesside University and Postgraduate Tutor in Gender Studies and Media Management at Stirling University. Robyn’s research interests lie in queering the Gothic from a queer feminist perspective and her work explores Queer theory, contemporary literature, film, and other media. Robyn has published in the international and interdisciplinary journal Girlhood Studies, in their special issue (12:1, 2019) on ‘Queering Girlhood’ (ed. Barbara Jane Brickman) and is featured in the edited collection New Queer Horror Film and Television (2020) eds. Darren Elliott-Smith and John Edgar Browning. Robyn’s most recent research focuses on intersectional Gothic Studies, African American Gothic, and the commodification of queerness. Robyn’s monograph The New Queer Gothic: Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction will be the next addition to the University of Wales’s Gothic Literary Series.

Tim Pattinson is currently a PhD student at HKBU’s Academy of Visual Arts and earned his MFA at USC School of Cinematic Arts. His independent animated films have broadcast on US TV and been licensed for distribution in Japanese and North American territories. Tim has animated for the UK’s Bob Godfrey Studios, and Hollywood’s ShadowMachine, and has lectured at universities in North America, the UK and Hong Kong. He was most recently Chair of Digital Media at SCAD. Tim’s lifelong love of animation is helping to fuel his current research, a series of animated documentary shorts about queer lived experiences. Tim identifies as a cis gay male with the pronouns he/him/his.

Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award-winning BBC trained - filmmaker and a theorist. She is the Reader in Film at SODA, Manchester School of Art, and a Visiting Professor in Film at the University of Gdansk, Poland.  She is the Former Head of the School for Film, Media and the Performing Arts at the UCA, UK.  Piotrowska is a member of the Visible Evidence General Council. She was the Director of the VE conference held in the summer of 2022 at the University of Gdansk. Piotrowska has written extensively on psychoanalysis and cinema, including The Nasty Woman and the neo femme fatale in contemporary cinema (2019). She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (2014, Routledge.) the revised Second Edition of which in will be published in 2023

Lou Rich (they/them) is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Their dissertation examines the representations of bisexuality and bieroticism in world Anglophone and Sinophone literatures and new medias. Other research interests include queer theory, digital culture, and visual media.

Jennifer Richards is a Research Tutor in Fashion at the Royal College of Art. Her work explores a wide range of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices. She interrogates the idea of the meta discourse, language, ritual, identity, and the body. Recent research publications include articles on aesthetics, performance and the body within film and visual culture. Her current work explores the ‘Influence of the (Gothic) Genre in High Fashion’, in Clive Bloom (ed), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. This chapter explores the re-emergence of Gothic modes within contemporary Fashion from street style to haute couture.

Greg Thorpe is the Festival Director of GAZE, Ireland’s international LGBTQIA film festival, taking place annually in Dublin (3-7 August). He is also a freelance writer, curator, creative producer, and a graduate of MMU’s creative writing programme.

Dr Aiqing Wang is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the Department of Languages, Cultures and Film, University of Liverpool. Her PhD project investigated Late Archaic Chinese syntax. Apart from historical and modern Chinese linguistics, her ongoing research interest also includes classical and contemporary literature and cultural studies. She is particularly interested in danmei subculture, fandom and online fiction.

Meg Wilson (she/they) is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Her research maps the cinematic landscapes and discursive formation of the “lesbian period drama” in film and television, amidst an apparently paradoxical moment for lesbian identity: feared obsolescence and heightened cultural visibility. Megan holds a BA in Film Studies from King’s College London, and a MA in Gender, Sexuality & Culture from the University of Manchester. Her first publication, “Food, Consumption and Queer Subjectivity in Contemporary American Cinema,” can be found in the edited collection Queering Nutrition and Dietetics: LGBTQ+ Reflections on Food Through Art (Routledge, 2022).