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A preface with promise: revisiting Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace
Full text linkThe Spanish Lesbian Collective LSD: A Closer Look to Their Video-Essay Retroalimentación (1998)
Full text linkIn 1993, the group LSD (Lesbianas sin duda / Lesbians without a doubt) was created in Madrid. It was a collective of artivists including Itziar Okariz Virginia Villaplana, Fefa Vila, Azucena Vietes, Marisa Maza, and Liliana Couso, among others. They met in the downtown neighbourhood of Lavapiés to publish magazines and fanzines such as Bollozine or Non Grata, dedicated to film, music, photography, and the Spanish queer art scene overall. In addition, they carried out two photographic projects that are already part of the national lesbian imaginary: Es-Cultura lesbiana and Monstruosidades. This collective, which uses artistic channels for activism, takes a model of a community that is no longer a conqueror of rights (liberalism) but rather a destroyer of all aspects of a hierarchical society.
Queer activism is located at the margins of representation, understood as “an abject margin full of monsters, in which race, class and sex are mixed, ready to come to light and destabilize the dominant discourses" (García, 2016, p. 162). Violence is no longer understood individually but within a social structure. Some of these artists later continued their careers with video actions and performances in public places, exposing their bodies and thus problematising their gender and sexual orientation, as several of them contributed to the visibility of lesbians in Spain at the turn of the century.
This article analyses the photographic and collage work of the Spanish lesbian collective LSD, taking as object of study the video essay Retroalimentación (1998), made by the LSD member Virginia Villaplana
“Nomi Malone is what Las Vegas is all about!”: Phallic women in Showgirls
Full text linkShowgirls (1995) was a high-budget, high-concept Hollywood movie that immediately bombed at the box office. Despised by audiences and critics, Showgirls later found an appreciative audience through late-night cult screenings in cinemas, drag shows, and in academic discourse on trash cinema. Considered lowbrow and sleazy due to its abundance of female nudity, Showgirls is reconsidered in this article. With its hyper-stylised format, considered visual construction, and campy performances, Showgirls, perhaps inadvertently, allows space for a queer female subjectivity through main character Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkeley); a complicated woman who embodies an intersection of gendered, sexual and classist oppressions that are archetypal of the fallen woman melodrama of classical Hollywood.
By queering Nomi’s journey through the heteropatriarchy that is the Las Vegas showgirl scene, this article identifies themes of narcissism and doubling that enable Nomi to construct her phallic public performance of female sexuality when she is on the stage, in order to protect a tender, loving, yet naïve inner self that emerges with close interactions with her best (girl) friend Molly (Gina Ravera). Nomi’s sexualised stage-self -reflected and thrown back at her through omnipresent mirrors - reveals the sacrifices she must make to reach for her dreams but also to protect her fragile, yet expansive capacity for loving other women. Showgirls unveils the complex struggle for empowerment that women face in patriarchal societies yet, unsurprisingly, perhaps this narrative journey was instrumental in the film’s box office failure and categorisation into trash cinema
Understanding the Relationship between Canadian Law and Settler-Colonial Land Ontologies for Contemporary Decolonisation Movements
Full text linkThis article uses a decolonial framework to reveal the power of legality in the settler-colonial states’ legitimation of ontological occupation. Using the 1997 Delgamuukw decision and the Coastal GasLink Pipeline as central case studies, this paper reveals that the historical interrelationship between settler-colonial land ontologies and Canadian law during the process of colonisation has influenced the Canadian court system in ways that limit possibilities for decolonisation, and recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. 
Emotional Registers of Queer Representation: Gothic Expression in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Vivienne Medrano’s “Addict”
Full text linkQueer representation in media often relies on a limited perspective built around identity visibility. Who or what is this made to serve? As with the unhappy queer archives Sara Ahmed explores in The Promise of Happiness, queerness is rendered as a surface level struggle for legitimacy in society and relationships, that far too often ends in melancholy or despair. While non-queer audiences indulge in a temporary alignment with a vicarious interpretation of queer experience, the queer audience is presented with an often melancholic or distressing representation of our racist, hetero-patriarchal, neoliberal capitalist present. Working within western canons assembled through the fetishising of liberal rationality, to be outside the scope of the liberal human subject is a wide and deep realm of the undefined and unknown. This is the home of speculative fiction and where the sprouts of popular media were seeded. The gothic, horror, and science fiction grew out of the artistic impulses that clash at the borderlands between the rational and irrational, known and unknown, subject and object, human and queer.
The twisting meeting places of horror and queerness is experienced best within queer treatments of horror. A close reading of the queer emotional affects in the queer media products The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s “Floor Show” sequence and Hazbin Hotel’s music video “Addict,” demonstrates that queer representation is inclusively produced through emotional affects most visible in horror. Furthermore, the gothic and horror pastiche at work within these two particular segments shows Jack Halberstam’s low theory in action
Re-imagining religion: Scottish writers and the breadth of religion
Full text linkTo tie in with this issue’s theme of theology and imagination, this review essay reflects on four relatively recent works by Scottish authors in order to explore the ubiquitous and often deeply unsettling experience of Scottish religion in literature and the arts.
Reviewed works:
Meg Bateman, Robert Crawford and James McGonigal, eds., Scottish Religious Poetry: From the Sixth Century to the Present (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2000)
Edwin Morgan, A.D.: A Trilogy of Plays on the Life of Jesus (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000)
James Robertson, News of the Dead (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2021)
David Brown, God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007
Editorial: Theology, imagination, and the arts
Full text linkThis issue is dedicated to an exploration of the relationship between theology and imagination. The inspiration for this particular subject arose out of a desire to honour the legacy of the late Rev Prof D. W. D. Shaw, a founding member of the editorial board of Theology in Scotland and the first Editor of the journal. Included in the issue is the text of the first in a series of annual lectures given in recognition of Bill Shaw’s contribution to the field of theology in Scotland
From the Outside In: Veganism, Identity Communication, and Resisting Carnism
Full text linkVeganism is a philosophy and lifestyle which rejects the consumption of animal products and calls for an end to animal exploitation. This article is an ethnographic exploration of how vegans internally comprehend and externally communicate vegan identity. Ethnographic data is drawn from a mosaic of personal reflections, virtual engagement with university-aged vegans, and observation of online vegan spaces. This data demonstrates that veganism and vegan identity are, at their core, a rejection of carnism: the social norm of accepting animal exploitation. Using psychological and linguistic approaches, I describe vegan identity as performative — vegans use behaviour and language used to identify themselves as vegan amongst peers and in public spaces. Through an ethnographic approach, I argue that the invisible dominant ideology of carnism rules both the minds of omnivores who accept it, and the behaviour and identities of vegans who fight it, particularly in online spaces. Both vegan identities and vegans’ interactions with omnivores are shaped by defiance of carnism
Historical Trauma, Queer Sex, and Physical Touch in Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses
Full text linkFor lesbian-feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer, “making up” lost queer history in the absence of conventional archives is a material and embodied process seen in her experimental documentary Nitrate Kisses (1992). This film centres around different queer couples portraying various erotic, physical and sexual acts. Each of these acts are aligned with voice-over interviews and visual archival ephemera detailing particular historical traumas, including the AIDS crisis and the erasure of lesbian experiences from life narratives of Holocaust survivors. I argue that the body and various erotic acts in Nitrate Kisses become sites of consciousness and cognition employed in the recovery of traumatic memory. As I explore, it is physical touch—sexual and erotic touch in particular—that acts as a conduit for accessing lost or purposefully invisibilized archival knowledge. Employing Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography, I argue that sex and other forms of physical touch in Hammer’s film become a method of remembering historical injustices, making them visible through an embodied queer-feminist archival practice in order for the viewer to bear witness to trauma that has shaped queer cultural memory.
This article contains images of nudity and sexual behaviour