Arts & Culture

A love-letter to my Bookcase

by Ania Plomien

About a year ago, on February 14th 2023, I read out this letter at a UCU Four Fights strike teach-out. The industrial action for fair pay, sustainable workloads, gender, race and disability equality, and eradicating casualisation ended in September after a months-long marking and assessment boycott. All these struggles remain relevant in the face of persistent economy-wide […]

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    A Longstanding Fear: LGBT Panic, Conservative Islamic Backlash, and Queer Islamic Resistance in Indonesia

A Longstanding Fear: LGBT Panic, Conservative Islamic Backlash, and Queer Islamic Resistance in Indonesia

This piece is part of the East Asia Solidarity blog series, “Look East”, which highlights gender knowledge and studies of the East and Southeast Asia region. The initiative was conceptualised and led by MSc students of the LSE Gender Department in the summer of 2023, and explores themes around locating identity, heritage and (re/newed) knowledge of gender studies in the region. […]

  • photo of The Hunt by Mahasweta Devi, taken by the author
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    Book Review: Subverting the Norms and Constructs of Gender – The Hunt by Mahasweta Devi

Book Review: Subverting the Norms and Constructs of Gender – The Hunt by Mahasweta Devi

By Aadya Narain 

Mahasweta Devi (1990) The hunt. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 5:1, 61-79.

Photo of The Hunt by Mahasweta Devi, taken by the author

Mahasweta Devi is a political activist and author who wrote about subaltern, marginalised communities in India with a piercing feminist gaze. Her deceptively simple and accessible language in “The Hunt” reveals the complex socio-cultural realities […]

Letters to Myself: Trans Joy in Troubling Times

by Cal Brantley

Mural from Austin, TX, USA, April 2023
Why does the LGBTQ+ community unify the most during queer/transphobic tragedy or political attacks? It is true that life is unfortunately nasty, brutish, and short for too many trans siblings around the world–but too often, our arguments for trans rights are framed only around alleviating our suffering.

Trans suicide and murder rates. […]

An exercise in looking

by Anna Blus (all photography and text)

Image 1. Balloons after a celebration in front of a block of flats, South London, 2021

Image 2. Window sign, March 2020

Image 3. Outdoor exercise, Myatts Fields, 2021

Image 4. Court in session (sign reads “DO NOT RING BELL, COURT IN SESSION”), South London, 2021

Image 5. A rainy street in lockdown, 2020

Image 6. Working from home, […]

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    Book Review: What Is Sexual Capital? Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz. Polity Books. 2022.

Book Review: What Is Sexual Capital? Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz. Polity Books. 2022.

by Sevde Nur Unal

In What is Sexual Capital, Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz (2022) present a thought-provoking debate around a sociological metaphor, namely sexual capital. The authors mainly argue that sexuality can function as a type of capital when it operates as a way to achieve a variety of (historically-specific) benefits, from economic gains in the commercial sex industry to […]

Returning to Paracas: a phenomenology of trauma

by Daniela Meneses

I must have been four or five, but I have always thought of it as something without a beginning, something that always already was. Every summer and every winter, I would spend the school vacations in Paracas, a small town by the Peruvian coast. I would stay there with my paternal grandmother, my brother and my cousin. […]

On/Off Her Way Home

by Wen Wen 

 

The legendary sea surfaces

That meteoric stones have rolled over

An establishing shot, takes only one flash

Thinking of you, murmuring to you,

Until some tears run dry, turning reddish

Dipping upon a dream (many nights)

Once thinking of you, she is

Across the water of no name

Looking out the way back to you, she is

Still writing in English (how?):

‘Travelling around the world

From the […]

Liminalities of time and its flashes

by Kashi Syal

1.

Blossom acts as a seasonal clock even before daylight savings. Spring comes and the days stretch. Every April, I think about T.S Eliot’s bankers walking over London Bridge trying not to jump, the minutiae of a life measured by coffee spoons, all of Plath’s unlived lives. Up Bond Street, Clarissa Dalloway has the oddest sense of being […]

Apostrophe

by Claire Wilmot

          i. polemic

Look I know this one hits different, but I’m writing to tell you I’m tired of asking is this it? with every new blip in crisis time, tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop only to realize that both have fallen already, might keep falling forever. And just cause […]

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