Excursions Journal

Foreword: Exploring the Meaning of Outside/rs

Ashley Reilly-Thornton — 2023-04-20

Outside/rs 2022 was a postgraduate conference held on 2nd and 3rd April 2022 at the University of Brighton. The conference aimed to build a common understanding of the challenges in accounting for what we called Outsider experiences and positions, as they relate to gender, sex and sexualities. We invited criticisms, definitions and explorations of what Outside/rs might mean in relation to queerness, transness and beyond. This Excursions Special Issue showcases selected papers from this conference to continue the conversations we began at Outside/rs 2022.

"How Did We Get Here?" Etiology and Erasure in Trans History

Tomara Garrod — 2023-04-20

This article provides an overview of trans historiography, whose dominant form is etiological, searching for origin of contemporary categories of trans gender. Performing my own etiology of this historiographic tendency, I show the ways that it mirrors historic treatments of trans subjects, in privileging categories of body and identity over the lived realities of people and their communities. This academic fixation only repeats the historic and contemporary erasure that characterises transgender people’s everyday, and reduces the conceptual possibilities for trans thought and life.

"Lesbian with the attributes of a man: Is a trans history of male masochism possible?

Jay Szpilka — 2023-04-20

This article is an attempt at presenting a case for thinking about male masochism—from its conceptual inception in late 19th century sexology, to its contemporary framing as a sexual practice falling under the umbrella of BDSM—as having close historical connections with the history of transness, and trans femininity in particular. In order to do so, I provide an overview of the way that the idea of male masochism as femininely gendered has been variously posited, contested, and disavowed across 130 years of masochism’s discursive history. Finally, I argue for the necessity of histories of trans femininity to accept speculative approaches as a valid way of thinking about the possibilities of trans history, and ask what political ends have been served by the “cisisfication” of masochism and practices of sexual submissiveness, which is rendering them culturally legible as having nothing to do with their practitioners’ gender.

Queering the Fens: an exploration of land, supernatural, folklore and queer reproduction as art making

James Chantry — 2023-04-20

This essay refers to a body of work and research that considers the connections and intersections of the supernatural and Queerness. The project began with an exploration of ghost stories and their connection to repressed sexuality and identity, mediumship and its relationship to transgression of gender. This revealed notions of supernatural Queer male birth and how making art can embody this. A specific personal geographic location: the Lincolnshire Fens became important in its: liminality, landscape, wealth of folklore and connection to Queerness, politics, and the queer body’s relationship to the land. Working in a transdisciplinary manner I have produced charged and evocative time based media, using methods of creation related to mediumship and the supernatural. Particularly: performance, sculpture and drawing, woven into video installations. I have proposed speculative queer futures that challenge hegemony, examine queer identity and celebrate the downright weird.

The Outsider’s Space In-Between: Renegotiating Monstrosity in Contemporary Transgender Short Fiction

Steph Berens — 2023-04-20

The image of trans monstrosity has been firmly anchored in mainstream North American popular culture, most notably through films such as Psycho, Dressed to Kill, and The Silence of the Lambs. This cultural vilification has had catastrophic effects on trans communities, stoking violence especially against trans-feminine people, promoting discrimination, and severely affecting trans people’s self-images. By analysing two contemporary short stories, Julian K. Jarboe’s I Am A Beautiful Bug! and A.K. Blue’s God Empress Susanna, this paper examines different approaches to the monster trope from trans perspectives and investigates the entanglements between trans identity, monstrosity, and disability.

An Essay in Conversation: Queer and Queering in the Prison

Kayleigh Charlton — 2023-04-20

This essay is a conversation between two doctoral students interested in themes of queer and queering in the prison. We cover issues ranging from LGBTQ+ social exclusion to the housing of trans prisoners within the gendered prison service, all while negotiating our different backgrounds and experiences of the topics. The essay delves into the idea of “change” and the complexities of challenging the prison system, whether that is the old Victorian buildings, the institutionalisation of staff members, or existing prisoners. We reflect upon these challenges from our unique individual viewpoints within academia and as a practitioner psychologist. We introduce proposals for our own individual research projects which both aim to gain a greater understanding of the experiences of queer prisoners within the prison service, expanding upon the previous work conducted mostly within the USA but also more recently within UK prisons.

Cosmic Dancers, Cosmetic Shells: Exploring the Queer Potential of London’s Blitz in the Early Thatcher Era

Chloë Edwards — 2023-04-20

This paper concentrates on the ways in which masculinity and male (homo)sexuality were challenged, depicted, and expressed within the New Romantic subculture of Margaret Thatcher’s first term (1979-1983). Centring on the subculture’s nucleus, the Blitz nightclub in London’s Covent Garden, which served as a safe space in which its clientele could explore their identities away from the prevailing Conservative ideology of the time, I examine the work of prominent figures who prompted reflections on attitudes towards mainstream gay visibility and the shift in representations of queerness within popular culture in Thatcher’s Britain. Considering the legacy of punk’s contradictory attitudes towards non-heterosexual identities and its ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos with questions of class, this paper questions the intersections of and tensions between identity and consumption under Thatcher. Tracking the rise of the young, arts-oriented demographic of the Blitz and those who facilitated the subculture’s move from outside, to inside of the mainstream popular music scene, namely Steve Strange of Visage and Boy George, I offer a queer reading of their output that illustrates the subversive subculture’s ability to bring non-heterosexual masculinities into mainstream popular music in early 1980s Britain, concurrently demonstrating that assessments of the subculture as being only aesthetically-oriented are too reductive.

Care and Loyalty in the Closet: A review of scholarship on sexual identity disclosure in queer South Asian women

Pooja Marwaha — 2023-04-20

This paper highlights a gap in scholarship on personal and family relationships of British queer South Asian women and queer women of colour. It enables fields of study within queer theory, family sociology and intimate relationships to move beyond Western normative frames when looking at queer individuals and their relationships. Existing research on queer people of colour is limited and, where present, rarely focuses on diasporic British queer South Asian women. This paper looks at the diasporic context and highlights why the South Asian family unit should not be categorised as homophobic. It looks at how notions of ‘coming out’ and ‘the closet’ are Westernised and Eurocentric. It also looks at the use of ‘the closet’ as a shield emanating from a place of care for the family and self. This paper also presents queer women of colour as individuals who are moving beyond a binary of being queer and ostracised from family or as pretending to be straight to remain in their family, asking if this can also be the case for queer South Asians. Finally, throughout this paper, the discussion touches on the concept of ‘chosen families’ and how it may apply to queer South Asian women.

Multilingualism in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater and Zahra Patterson’s Chronology

Karolína Zlámalová — 2023-04-20

Multilingualism is one of marginalised authors’ strategies to express their stories and identities when writing in what bell hooks labelled ‘the oppressor’s language’. It allows them to navigate language imbued with contradictions: the language that connects and provides terminology for some marginalised identities while being infused with various oppressive regimes. This article discusses the forms and roles of multilingualism in two queer life-writing texts: written in English and interwoven with African influences, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018c) is an autobiographical novel; Zahra Patterson’s Chronology (2018) is an experimental autobiographical essay. The scope and the forms of multilingualism differ: in Chronology, a significant part of the text is written in Sesotho; in Freshwater, the passages in Igbo are comparably scarce. Emezi, however, also adopts a non-Western register in the English passages as another strategy of postcolonial writing ‘in character’. The article argues that while the concrete strategies vary, the authors employ multilingualism for similar political and aesthetic purposes: they utilise it to challenge the presumed universality of the Western conceptualisations of identity, gender, and sexuality, to express hybridity and heterogeneity of the narrated identities, and for its potential to create intimacy in the language.

Sex Workers: The Outside/r’s Outsider

Brit Erin Schulte — 2023-04-20

Brit Schulte posits that the sex working person is confronted by ever-increasing demand as well as proportionately increasing criminalization and persecution. They also see the sex working person as representative of queer and trans*-- truly, of outsider subjectivity. The tension produced by these coextensive increases creates the conditions that compel an outsider (sex worker) to fight for an end to stigma and marginalization. This necessary struggle that they outline takes place in broader movement spaces, grassroots collectives, smaller mutual aid networks, and between fellow workers. Their essay highlights experiences within the above categories of queer and trans* sex worker-led community organizing, specifically drawing upon full-service sex worker-run mutual aid networks, harm reduction formations, tech-centred activism, and fetish provider-led collectives. Through personal and broader movement analysis, Schulte links sex workers' political fights to the broader struggle for labour justice under capitalism, locating sex worker organizing in our contemporary moment in a rich tradition of hustle and survival.

Queering the Schizophrenic Body: Re-orientated nerves

Phyla Kupferschmidt — 2023-04-20

In this paper I explore how some insights about queer embodiment can be applied to the subtleties of psychotic experience, introducing a recovery-oriented dialogue between a queer-phenomenological and phenomenological-psychiatric approach. More specifically, I show how some concepts from Sara Ahmed can complement the ipseity-disturbance model, with which Louis Sass and his colleagues have re-introduced phenomenological psychiatry to mainstream schizophrenia research.

A Black Queer Phenomenology of Space in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Lucien Darjeun Meadows — 2023-04-20

In Giovanni’s Room (1956), James Baldwin emphasises the Black queer space of architecture, particularly of lines, walls, and wallpaper. In particular, by using walls to highlight the existence of the poché, or in-between architectural pocket space, Baldwin generates an inside/outside space that facilitates a slippage and reclamation of subjectivity for his queer characters.
Throughout this novel, the characters seek shelter and are described as houses and walls themselves even as they are un-housed in spaces which, from an apartment building to the human body, are always permeable and temporary. Each wall of Baldwin’s novel is, like Black space and queer space, a site of tension and entanglement. These walls are complicated by Giovanni’s violent efforts to expand the architectural and symbolic space of his room. He takes a
hammer to the walls not to escape into another apartment on the other side of the walls but, rather, to open the poché between walls.
The poché is a liminal and undefined inside/outside space (even on architectural blueprints, when/if it appears). Baldwin’s use of the poché in this novel disrupts white and (hetero)normative expectations of space and classification, makes visible hidden histories, resists stability, and promotes inclusive assemblages.