By Annette Kuhn. I observed that the all-female audience in the packed auditorium responded gleefully as one, talking back to the characters, cheering on the “goodies”, booing the “baddies”. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time.
Lesbian Camp: But I’m a Cheerleader by Jamie Babbit
By Clara Bradbury-Rance. Jamie Babbit’s characters have a habit of wreaking as much as havoc as possible, romantically or otherwise, in the cisheteropatriarchy. This politics is profound but it’s also pink, personal, parodic and it pops.
Lesbian Camp: Just Livin’: Yes It’s F**cking Political shorts programme
By Cathy Brennan. What connects these shorts is a preoccupation with the relationship between LGBT individuals and the concept of community. No one can really live without the support of others.
Culture Club: Watching SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS by Sheila McLaughlin
By Jacob Engelberg. Where Sheila McLaughlin’s 1987 lesbian-feminist film She Must Be Seeing Things goes, heated discussions follow. The film doesn’t, however, provide simple answers to the questions of power, gender, desire, and paranoia that it raises. Instead, Seeing Things stays with the tensions and contradictions around these issues, giving form to them in ways that have proven, over time, both alluring and troubling.
Culture Club: Watching A PRAYER BEFORE BIRTH by Jacqui Duckworth
By Lucy Howie. Sitting in the Cinenova online archives is the work of lesbian, feminist filmmaker Jacqui Duckworth, whose semi-autobiographical film A Prayer Before Birth (1991) has remained untouched by secondary scholarship. I felt a sense of urgency in writing on Duckworth, whose name I had not encountered before and is one that could so easily disappear from contemporary lesbian feminist collective consciousness.
Culture Club: Watching REBEL DYKES by Harri Shanahan and Sîan Williams
By Jenn Thompson Rebel Dykes premiered at BFI Flare 2021, and will be distributed in the UK and Ireland by …
Culture Club: Reading Neglected British Women Crime Writers of the ‘Golden Age,’ and Just Beyond…
By Sara Chambers. Moving deeper into the margins of neglected female writers of this era I discovered I was hooked and actively sought out new names. I’d like to share a selection of titles by those either languishing in obscurity or neglected because they’re seen as old fashioned.
Culture Club: Reading PARADISE ROT by Jenny Hval
By Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou. During the second lockdown, I started to reread Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot. Looking to Hval’s novel, I wanted to see the beauty in it all, the thread of life holding it all together, the brownish stain of the rotting apple leading us outdoors, into light, into spring, into a reinvigorated and reconstituted sense of self.
Culture Club: Watching A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES by Lynne Sachs and VEVER by Deborah Stratman
By Giulia Rho
Watching these films on the occasion of International Women’s Day I am left hopeful of the connections we are able to draw. We need to cultivate our genealogy, reworking the old in order to create something new, much like Sachs and Stratman do in their collaboration with Hammer.
Culture Club: Watching IT’S A SIN by Russell T. Davies
By Annie Ring. Davies’ show robs Jill of ambivalence in a way that made me wonder how we can avoid our queer kinship relationships being complicit with neoliberal reductions of the state. Thinking through ambivalence, as I do below with reference to Roszika Parker’s feminist psychoanalysis, can help us by contrast to build more critical kinship for viral times.