Queer@King's

Queer@King's is an interdepartmental and interdisciplinary group of researchers that has been operating in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities since 2003. After playing a pioneering role in the research culture of the University of London by bringing together colleagues interested in gender and sexuality, Queer@King's became one of the Faculty's official centres in 2006.

Indebted to the social-political and intellectual-conceptual energies and concerns of queer theory as it emerged in the 1990s and to the earlier and concurrent LGBT liberation movements, Queer@King's aims to be an institutionalised irritant to the institutional context in which it exists. Our Centre is committed to being an inclusive, non-hierarchical, multivocal collective that provides a supportive and stimulating environment for queer work within and beyond the academy. We strive to be an accessible community of students and scholars irrespective of seniority or disciplinary background, with a clear awareness of our role as an ally, advocate, and collaborator for queer activism, art, and community work. As such, Queer@King's is first and foremost a gathering place and a facilitator for the ideas and projects of individuals and groups that fall within the Centre's remit, whether they are researchers, students, activists, practitioners, or any combinations thereof.

Originally set up to organise a major international conference, 'Queer Matters', which took place in King's in May 2004, we have since then organised each year research seminars, public lectures, one-day symposia, readings, performances and other events on queer topics. Previous distinguished victors include: Sara Ahmed, Carolyn Dinshaw, Laura Doan, Lisa Duggan, Lee Edelman, Sarah Franklin, Judith Halberstam, David Halperin, Nadine Hubbs, Mark Jordan, Heather Love, Madhavi Menon, Mandy Merck, José Muñoz, Peggy Phelan, Alan Sinfield, Stephen Whittle and Michael Warner.

The Queer@King’s programme also regularly features contributions from major artists, literary figures, filmmakers and political activists. Previous events have included: Travis Alabanza, Ron Athey, Neil Bartlett, Mark Doty, Amber Hollibaugh, Alan Hollinghurst, Isaac Julien, Kiki and Herb, Frank McGuinness, Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, Victoria Sin, Del LaGrace Volcano, Edmund White and Cui Zi’en.

The Centre is directed by Sebastian Matzner

The Steering Group advises and supports the Director: Victoria Carroll, Daniel Luther, Daniel Orrells, Clara Bradbury-Rance, Mark Turner, Katrin Schindel (PGR Representative/ Centre Administrator).

Meet the Centre Director: One minute with... Sebastian Matzner

Members

Johan Andersson

Senior Lecturer in Human Geography

Sita Balani

Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Chris Berry

Professor of Film Studies

Clara Bradbury-Rance

Liberal Arts Early Career Development Fellow in Digital Culture

James Cahill

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Victoria Carroll

Teaching Fellow in Literature and Cultural Theory

Red Chidgey

Director, MA Cultural and Creative Industries & Lecturer in Gender and Media

Emeritus Richard Dyer

Professor of Film Studies

Catherine El Zerbi

Post Doctoral Research Associate

Jane Elliott

Reader in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory

Victor Fan

Senior Lecturer in Film Studies

Zeena Feldman

Lecturer in Digital Culture

Seb Franklin

Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature

Simon Gaunt

Professor of French Language and Literature

Liang Ge

Research Student actively participating in Queer@King's

Laura Gowing

Professor of Early Modern History

John Howard

Emeritus Professor of Arts and Humanities

Qi Li

Research Student actively participating in Queer@King's.

Daniel Luther

Visiting Research Associate

Sebastian Matzner

Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature. Director of Queer@King's.

Ya'Ara Notea

Research Student actively participating in Queer@King's.

Christine Okoth

Research Student actively participating in Queer@King's.

Daniel Orrells

Reader of Ancient Literature & its Reception, Head of Department of Classics

Anne Pollock

Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine

Rioghnach Sachs

Research Student actively participating in Queer@King's.

Sarah Salih

Senior Lecturer. Co-Director of the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies.

Maryanne Saunders

Research Student actively participating in Queer@King's.

Rebecca Saunders

Digital Culture, Media and Economies

Christina Scharff

Reader in Gender, Media and Culture

Katrin Schindel

PGR Representative and Centre Administrator for Queer@King's.

Lara Shalson

Senior Lecturer in Theatre & Performance Studies

Harriet Thompson

Research student

Mark Turner

Professor of Nineteenth & Twentieth-Century Literature

Dan Udy

Research Student actively participating in Queer@King's.

Byrony White

Research Student actively participating in Queer@King's

Robert Wintemute

Professor of Human Rights Law

ParaPride: Activist-in-residence scheme

For the 2019/2020 academic year, we funded our Queer@King’s Research Centre to trial an activist-in-residence scheme in conjunction with the charity ParaPride.

Activist/s in Residence Scheme

In the academic year 2019/20, we are launching our first-ever Queer@King’s Activist/s-in-Residence scheme. The pilot project provides LGBTQ+ activists from the Greater London area access to King's resources, infrastructure and administrative support, alongside an activism budget of £1,000, so that they may realise ideas for community projects and activist work and give their work greater reach, visibility and impact. For full details about the scheme, including information on how to apply, please see the website:

KCL Queer Activists

QueerAsia

Through our Visiting Research Associate, Dr Daniel Luther, Queer@King’s has partnered with QueerAsia to jointly run events focused on building and supporting LGBTQ+ communities in Asia and Asian diasporas, especially in the Greater London area, and to critically explore what work notions of ‘queerness’ and ‘Asia’ do in discourses on belonging and non-normative sexualities and gender.

Dr Daniel Luther

Queer Asia

A Saint for Sinners, An Emperor for Queens: The Parallel Lives of St Sebastian and Heliogabalus as Icons of Queer Masculinity

The saintly Christian soldier and the ultimate ‘bad emperor’ occupy a prominent place in the imaginary of men that wrestle with hegemonic masculinity. In their heavily gender roles, both pose a challenge to (hetero)normative masculinity: Sebastian by conforming to, but amending normative masculinity from a position of embraced disempowerment, revalorizing his passive suffering as arrows rain down on him; Heliogabalus by ostentatious gender-bending and self-determined disregard for tradition from a position of absolute power. Both are eventually killed by the Praetorian guard, both have their bodies dumped in Rome's sewers—and both go on to become icons of queer masculinities in afterlives that range from appearances in Thomas Mann's Tod in Venedig (‘Death in Venice’) and Yukio Mishima's Kamen no Kokuhaku (‘Confessions of a Mask’) to dedicated works like Antonine Artaud’s Héliogabale, ou l’anarchiste couronné (‘Heliogabalus, or the Crowned Anarchist') and Derek Jarman's Sebastiane. Dr Sebastian Matzner's project unfolds the remarkable story of how two late antique figures became global queer icons. A planned monograph, inspired in form and approach by Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, will scrutinize them as contrapuntal models for dissident masculinities and crystallization points for reflections on male bodies and desire, aestheticism and power, self-determination and abjection, offering timely new insights into histories and strategies of countercultural male self-fashioning.

Dr Sebastian Matzner

Gender & Sexuality Modules at King’s (UG/PGT)

5AACAR19 Sex and the Symposium: The Evidence of Athenian Painted Pottery

5AACTL45 Roman Love Elegy

5AAEB014 Subjects of Desire in Medieval Religious Writings

6AAEC026 Critically Queer

5AAFF253 Death & Desire: Love in French Literature before 1700

5AAFF260 Obscenity and Civility in Pre- and Early-Modern French Literature

6AAFF369 Queer Sexuality in Pre-Modern French Literature

5AAGB213 Gender and Identity in Arthurian Romance

6AAGB609 Religion, Sex and Politics: German literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

5AAH2026 Sexuality and Gender in Modern Britain

6AAH3071-72 Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Arab World

6AANB039 Gender & Philosophy

5AASB066 The Study of Gender in Spanish American Literature and Culture

6AAT3721 Gender and Judaism: An Introduction to Rabbinic Literature

7ABA0016 Queer Connections: Male-Male Desire and the Classical Past

7AAICC26 Gender, Media & Culture

7AAVDC12 Gendering technology: Discourse, use and practice

7AAEM250 Eighteenth Century Writing, Gender and Culture

7AAEM220 Theatre, Gender and Culture in Jacobean London

7AAEM608 Women and the Poetics of Liberty

7AAEM669 Theatre and Performance Theory

7AAEM753 Queer American Poetry

7AAEM757 Decolonising Bodies: Drums, DJs and Dance Floors

7AAEM758 Man, Woman and Machine: Victorian Fictions

7AAEM759 Imperialism & Sexuality

7AAQS580 Contemporary French Cinema

7AAFM172 Learning from Experience: The Postcolonial, the Personal and the Literary

7AAH2006 The Body and Society in Early Modern Europe

7AAH3025 Gender and British Society, 1900-1945

7AATC738 Gender and Sexuality in Jewish Law & Society

7AATC742 Rabbinic Texts & Their Readers: Gender, Sexuality & The Body

Listen in!

Until his untimely death in 2014, Adrian Howells was the most established and prolific maker of one-to-one performance — namely, of performances presented serially to one audience-participant at a time. This lecture takes his permissive mantra — “It’s all allowed” — as its starting point, and asks how the logic of permission might speak to the related issues of freedom, agency, and choice, in relation to sexuality and identity, in performance and beyond. What is still at stake in queer theory and queer writing? What might it permit or enable in a reading of the work of Adrian Howells as well as other proximate practices of contemporary performance? Dominic Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Drama, at Queen Mary, University of London.

Queer@King's - It’s All Allowed: Adrian Howells, Queer Performance, and the Logic of Permission

One of the greatest strengths of Queer@King’s is the exceptional breadth of work undertaken by our members, which covers an enormous range of different media, cultures, periods, methods, and contexts – from modern lesbian cinema to secular and devotional eros in late medieval writing, from transnational Chinese queer stardom to the legacies of ancient literature and thought in modern notions of sex, from the pornographic paratexts of Pornhub to the erotics and politics of love in ancient world literature.

To get a sense of the range of our research, browse this year-by-year list of selected publications on queer topics by past and current Queer@King’s members:

2018

Moore, M. (2018). Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric. Yale University Press.

Udy, D. J. W. (2018). 'Am I gonna become famous when I get my boobs done?': Surgery and Celebrity in "Gigi Gorgeous: This is Everything". TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

2017

Bradbury-Rance, C. (2017). Lucy Nicholas, Queer post-gender ethics: The shape of selves to come. Feminist Theory, 18(1), 89-90. DOI: 10.1177/1464700116683658

Bradbury-Rance, C. (2017). The Translation of Desire: Queering Visibility in Nathalie… and Chloe. In B. J. Epstein, & R. Gillett (Eds.), Queer in Translation (pp. 144-55). Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781315603216

Chan, & A. Willis (Eds.), Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives (pp. 119-134). London: Routledge.

Gallagher, R., & Brown, A. M. L. (2017). Gaming and Sex. In Sex in the Digital Age (pp. 191-200). Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Li, E. C. Y. (2017). Desiring Queer, Negotiating Normal: Denise Ho (HOCC) Fandom before and after the Coming-Out. In M. Lavin, L. Yang, & J. J. Zhao (Eds.), Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (pp. 131-156). Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press.

Matzner, S. (2017). Looking for Love, Finding Trouble—Reading Ancient World Literature, Passionately: (Bridge Essay: The Erotics and Politics of Love). In K. Seigneurie (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature (Vol. 1). WILEY-BLACKWELL.

Newell, P. A. (2017). ‘Coming Out: 50 years of gay literature,’ The London School of Economics Literary Festival 2017. TLS: the Times literary supplement

Salih, M. S. A. L. (2017). Performances of Suffering: Secular and Devotional Eros in Late Medieval Writing. In B. Mudge (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature (pp. 34-46). (Cambridge Companions). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scharff, C. M. Gill , R., Kelan , & E. K. (2017). A Postfeminist Sensibility at Work. Gender, Work and Organization, 24(3), 226-244. DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12132

Udy, D. J. W. (2017). Diva Las Vegas: Queering Space in the Entertainment Capital of the World. GENDER PLACE AND CULTURE, 24(2). DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2017.1314946

2016

Berry, C. (2016). Women Characters, Women’s Cinema and Neo-liberal Modernity: Doubled and Split. In F.

Bradbury-Rance, C. (2016). Desire, Outcast: Locating Queer Adolescence. In F. Handyside, & K. Taylor-Jones (Eds.), International Cinema and the Girl (pp. 85-95). Palgrave Macmillan UK. DOI: 10.1057/9781137388926_7

Fan, H. L. V. (2016). Free-Indirect-Discourse Reboot: Beijing Queer Independent Cinema as a Mediating Environment. Reconstruction, 16(2).

Fan, H. L. V. (2016). Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema by Jean Ma. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.

Gowing, L. (2016). Girls on forms: Apprenticing young women in seventeenth-century London. Journal of British Studies, 55(3), 447-473. DOI: 10.1017/jbr.2016.54

Howard, J. (2016). Digital Queer History and the Limits of Gay Sex. In M. L. Gray, B. J. Gilley, & C. R. Johnson (Eds.), Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies (Intersections). New York: New York University Press.

Matzner, S. (2016). Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past. In S. Butler (Ed.), Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (pp. 179-201). Bloomsbury Academic.

Saunders, R. (2016). 'Open Wide and Say 'Aah': The Body and the Medical Authority of Pornograpjy. In H. Brunskell-Evans (Ed.), Performing Sexual Liberation: The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Scharff, C. (2016). Better to be sick than angry: young women as ideal neoliberal subjects. In S. Springer, J. Macleavy, & K. Birch (Eds.), The handbook of neoliberalism Routledge.

Scharff, C. Lemos De Carvalho Elias, A. S., & Gill, R. (2016). Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism. Palgrave Macmillan.

Scharff, C., Şahin, R., Smith-Prei, C., & Stehle, M. (2016). Riot Grrrls, Bitchsm, and pussy power: interview with Reyhan Şahin/Lady Bitch Ray. Feminist Media Studies, 16(1), 117-127. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2015.1093136

Scharff, C., Smith-Prei , C., & Stehle, M. (2016). Digital Feminisms: Transnational Activism in German Protest Cultures. Feminist Media Studies, 16(1). DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2015.1093069

Udy, D. J. W. (2016). Secrets, Lies, and The Real Housewives: The Death of an (Un)Popular Genre. In M. Luethe, & S. Pohlmann (Eds.), Unpopular Culture Amsterdam University Press.

Wintemute, R. W. (2016). European Law Against Discrimination on Grounds of Sexual Orientation. In Same-sex relationships and beyond: Gender matters in the EU Intersentia.

Wintemute, R. (2016). Unequal same-sex survivor's pensions: The EWCA refuses to apply CJEU precedents or refer. INDUSTRIAL LAW JOURNAL, 45(1), 89-99. [dww001]. DOI: 10.1093/indlaw/dww001

2015

Andersson, J. C. A. (2015). 'Wilding’ in the West Village: queer space, racism, and Jane Jacobs hagiography, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(2), 265-283. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12188

Andersson, J., Vanderbeck, R. M., Sadgrove, J., Valentine, G., & Ward, K. (2015). The transnational debate over homosexuality in the Anglican communion. In The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices and Politics (pp. 3283-3301). Springer Netherlands. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_172

Gallagher, R. (2015). Intergenerational Tensions: Of Sex and the Hardware Cycle. In Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games (pp. 13-27). Bloomsbury Academic.

Li, E. C. Y. (2015). Affect and Sociology: Reflection and Exploration through a Study of Media and Gender in Urban China. Graduate Journal of Social Science, 11(1), 15-37.

Li, E. C. Y. (2015). Approaching Transnational Chinese Queer Stardom as Zhongxing ('Neutral Sex/Gender') Sensibility. East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 1(1), 75-95. DOI: 10.1386/eapc.1.1.75_1

Li, E. C. Y., Kong, T. S. K., & Lau, S. H. L. (2015). The Fourth Wave? A Critical Reflection on Tongzhi Movement in Hong Kong. In M. McLelland, & V. Mackie (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia (pp. 188-201). Routledge.

Li, E. C. Y., Kong, T. S. K., & Lau, S. H. L. (2016). Sexual Cultures in Asia. In Wiley Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology, Second Edition (2 ed.). Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781405165518.wbeoss087.pub2

Matzner, S. (2015). Literary Criticism and/as Gender Reassignment: Reading the Classics with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. In K. Fisher, & R. Langlands (Eds.), Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past (pp. 200-220). (Classical Presences). Oxford University Press.

Matzner, S. (2015). Of That I Know Many Examples...: On the Relationship of Greek Theory and Roman Practices in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs Writings on the Third Sex. In J. Ingleheart (Ed.), Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities (pp. 93-108). (Classical Presences). Oxford University Press.

Orrells, D. J. (2015). Sex: Antiquity and its Legacy. IB Tauris, London/New York.

Scharff, C. (2015). Blowing your own trumpet: Exploring the gendered dynamics of self-promotion in the classical music profession. The Sociological Review, 63(S1), 97-112. DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12243

Wintemute, R. (2015). Message-printing businesses, non-discrimination and free expression: Northern Ireland’s ‘support gay marriage’ cake case. King's Law Journal, 26(3), 348-356. [A002]. DOI: 10.1080/09615768.2015.1114715

2014

Balani, S. (2014). many voices, one chant: 30^th anniversary roundtable. Feminist Review, 108(1) (pp. 26-43).

Carter, E. A. (2014). The Visible Woman in and against Béla Balázs. In M. Hagener (Ed.), The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-garde in Europe, 1919-1945 (Film Europa). Oxford and New York: Berghahn.

Carter, E. (2014). The New Woman and the ekphrastic poetics of Bela Balazs. Screen, 55(3), 404-412. DOI: 10.1093/screen/hju030

Gallagher, R. (2014). From camp to kitsch: A queer eye on console fandom. G|A|M|E, (3), 39-50.

Matzner, S. (2014). Homophilhellenismus: Heinrich Hösslis Eros und der emanzipatorische Rekurs auf die Männerliebe der Griechen. In R. Thalmann, & H-H-S. (Eds.), "Keine Liebe ist an sich Tugend oder Laster". Heinrich Hössli und sein Kampf für die Männerliebe (pp. 97-128). Chronos.

Salih, M. S. A. L. (2014). The Trouble with 'Female Sexuality'. Different Visions, 5.

Saunders, R. (2014). The Pornographic Paratexts of Pornhub. In N. Desrochers, & D. Apollon (Eds.), Examining Paratextual Theory and its Applications in Digital Culture Hershey PA.

Scharff, C. (2014). Schröder versus Schwarzer? Analysing the discursive terrain of media debates on feminism. Feminist Media Studies, 14(5), 837-852. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2013.805157