Category: “Writing”
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.
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.
By Jack Thompson. I had a visceral reaction to Rebel Dykes, about a group of punk dykes in 80s London. I think about how altered my life, and the life of many queers my age, might have been had we had ready access to this recent history as teens, to the fact rebel dykes existed in a tangible sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Elhum Shakerifar
Haratischvili’s abiity to draw connection and perspective is part of the joy of her writing… The question of hot chocolate is a thread that runs throughout the novel, and so I recommend you invest in something truly special to accompany your reading.
By Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou. One of my favourite images from Tara Fatehi Irani’s book, Mishandled Archive, is of a bride seated on the floor. She is very still, very quiet, but her eyes speak… She is gazing at her past; she is gazing at her future, at a future waiting, watching, approaching, soon to replace this moment.
By Jenny Chamarette I don’t think it’s a coincidence that It Takes Blood And Guts and The Forty-Year-Old Version have stuck with me while I experience my own mid-life inertia, as I reflect on the unseen power of my adolescent voice and look to rebuild my own creativity. And it makes sense to me to seek out the wisdom of Black women musicians and artists to do that.
