Queer Lit

What is the future of gender? The iconic Susan Stryker joins us for a live recording to see where this question might lead us and speak about how she investigated it in her new book Changing Gender. Susan explains why gender is in fact a Humanities problem, not a science problem, and how thinking about animacy, grammar and psychedelics might get us closer to understanding the work that gender does as a concept.

If you’re into trans rights and a bit of a grammar nerd, this will be your dream episode.  

References:
Susan Stryker’s Changing Gender: The History and Future of a Concept (Serpent’s Tail, 2026)
Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix”
Screaming Queens
Susan Stryker’s Transgender History
New House Art Space
Blossom LGBT
Katherine Hubbard
David Griffiths
Clare Butler
Papermoon Books
Whitechapel Gallery
Heather Love
Lena Mattheis’ Queer Forms and Pronouns (Oxford University Press, 2026)
Talia Mae Bettcher 
Ursula K. (Kroeber) Le Guin
Alfred Kroeber
Franz Boas
Greville Corbett
Surrey Morphology Group
James Anderson’s “Grammatical Disquisitions” (1792)
David Ricardo
Justus Liebig
Karl Marx
Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect
George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By
Ornette Coleman
Maria Lugones
Pod Save the UK
Compton’s Cafeteria Riot (1966)
Stonewall Riots (1969)  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:
     What does Susan say about autobiographical writing in her work? Why is this important?
     Susan introduces Talia Bettcher’s WTF concept. What does this mean to you? Please also look up Bettcher’s definition and/or listen to our Queer Lit episode with Bettcher.
     What does grammar have to do with gender?
     How does animacy impact language and pronoun use?
     Susan uses the example of a river to explain how our cosmologies and worldviews shape the way we use words and perceive categories. Can you think of another example of this?
     What do you think about the future of gender as a concept?

Welcome, children of the night, to a particularly shameless spooky special all about an eternally queer-coded fan favourite: the vampire. RJ Wade and Sarah Prescott join me to speak about bookish bloodsuckers, raunchy revenants, and sapphic succubi. The dramatic reading of a yet unperformed Carmilla play had me at the very edge of my seat and I also learned a lot about both the cultural and the literary history of vampirism.  

References:
Quite Shameless: Cultural Reflections on the Vampire
https://library.leeds.ac.uk/events/event/1900/galleries/1085/quite-shameless-cultural-reflections-on-the-vampire 
RJ Wade’s An Exhibition History of Victorian Leeds (Liverpool UP, 2023)
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781802078541
University of Leeds Cultural Collections
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Animated Activism: Women Empowered
https://library.leeds.ac.uk/events/event/1900/galleries/844/animated-activism-women-empowered
Hamilton Deane’s Dracula (1924)
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872)
The Dark Blue
Byron
Dracula Society
https://www.thedraculasociety.org.uk/
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928)
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928)
Dora Mary Patrick
Quincey Morris 
Van Helsing
Stage@Leeds
https://stage.leeds.ac.uk/
Christopher Craft’s “‘Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula” (1984)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928560
Chris Latham
Revenant
Wharram Percy
Maurice Beresford
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Josephine Butler
@lulgalleries
C.E. McGill’s Our Hideous Progeny
https://cemcgill.com/our-hideous-progeny/
BorrowBox
Libby
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Ally Wilkes’ All the White Spaces
The Bookish Type
https://thebookishtype.co.uk/
Kit Heyam https://kitheyam.com/  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:
     What might make a vampire queer? Which literary vampires do we speak about in the episode?
     When Sarah talks about a ‘pleasing terror’, what kind of experience is described and who is this phrase borrowed from? Have you ever felt a pleasing terror?
     How is the revenant figure similar to and different from the vampire?
     What does Wade say about the relevance of the medical humanities lens? Please look up the term medical humanities if you are not familiar.
     Do you have a favourite vampire? How queer-coded are they?

Have you ever thought about your age as being assigned at birth? In this episode, Simon(e) van Saarloos and I explore how queer thought might allow us to move beyond preconceptions of age, but also about the manifold and intersectional consequences of ageism. Simon(e) reflects on how trans narratives might work without reliance on linearity and why age is such a powerful category when it comes to agency.

CW: Around minutes 11 to 13, there is a nongraphic mention of sexual violence.  

References:
Simon(e) van Saarloos’ Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto (2023)
Simon(e) van Saarloos’ Playing Monogamy (2019)
Simon(e) van Saarloos’ Take ‘Em Down: Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (2021)
Simon(e) van Saarloos’ Give Piss A Chance: A Willing Suspension of Consequences
Trans Despair (2027)
Samantha Nye
MU Hybrid Art House in Eindhoven
Mona Eltahawy
Ira Kip
KIP Republic
Denise Ferreira Da Silva
Roe vs Wade
Crip time
Mel Y. Chen
Chrononormativity (Elizabeth Freeman)
Alison Kafer
JJJJJerome Ellis
Fred Moten
Fumi Okiji
@svansaarloos
Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn
Saketopoulou, A. (2026). Exigent Sadism. Social Text, 44(1), 25–51. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-12195785  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:
     What does Simon(e) mean by ‘change-phobic’?
     I really love when Simon(e) explains that “linear time is mapped onto the body and we call that age.” – How could we understand age in other ways? What might a queer approach to age be?
     Simon(e) mentions age-segregated institutions. What are examples of these and how does age shape institutions?
     How do race and colonialism play into age?
     How often do you think about age? Do you perceive age differently in and outside of queer and trans community?

We all know that trans people have existed throughout history, but what about before that? S.K. Marley does fascinating research on queerness and transness that predates written history and joins me to speak about what antler headdresses and wooden dolls might teach us about transness. We also discuss how transness, walking and wellbeing are entangled, which landscapes are the most nonbinary, and why ‘prehistory’ is a contested term in itself. Since we’re chatting in a beautiful park in York, this episode has some bonus bird song and squirrel mischief.  

References:
Out and Wild 
https://www.outandwild.co.uk/
Our Transcapes 
https://skmarley.co.uk/our-transcapes/
Ballachulish Goddess
Braak Bog Figures
The Wittemoor Figures
Shigir Idol
https://skmarley.co.uk/
@sk____marley
Our Flag Means Death  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:
     What does ‘prehistory’ mean?
     Why does S.K. speak about being trans and being in nature? What does this have to do with wellbeing?
     S.K. speaks about notions of truth in contemporary trans debates and about colonial perspectives in academia. Why is their focus on British prehistory important in both of these contexts?
     Why are the antler headdresses S.K. talks about a turning point in their research and their thinking about duality?
     Why are bogs trans? What is the most trans or nonbinary landscape you have ever encountered?

What does sound have to do with sexuality? C. Jade MacDonald has some fascinating insights on the queerness of noise, on trans voices in hyperpop, and on sound in literature. Learn about the queer kinship created by remixes and covers in contemporary music, but also about which sound technologies are historically entangled with sexology. My favourite bit: hearing about how Gertrude Stein resonates with SOPHIE.  

References:
C. Jade MacDonald (2024) “The Alien Resonances and Queer Obscurities of Hyperpop’s 100 gecs” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 36.2, pp. 76-98.
C. Jade MacDonald (2025) "'A Story that Wasn’t in the Words’: Music, Mothering, and Minor Figures" in The Crossroads of Music and Literature: New Essays on the Muse of Song, edited by Kelly Baron and Andrew DuBois, pp. 113-28.
C. Jade MacDonald (2027) "Their Lover's Noise: Modernism's Queer Phonographies" in Routledge Companion to Literature and Sound, edited by Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen and Maria Engberg.
Foucault’s The History of Sexuality
Saidiya Hartman
Julie Beth Napolin’s "Unrecordable Sound: Media History, Technology and the Racial Unconscious" in Anna Snaith, ed. Sound and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke UP, 2003)
Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology
Althusser
Gertrude Stein
SOPHIE
100 gecs’ “money machine”
Wendy Carlos
Dorian Electra
Charli xcx
A.G. Cook
Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (Quartet Books, 1998)
alien sonorities
Alice B. Toklas
Edmund Husserl
Alexander G. Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke UP, 2005) Grace E. Lavery’s Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton UP, 2023)
Perverse sincerity 
Simon & Garfunkel
Shakira
Gorillaz “Feel Good Inc”
@C.jademacdonald
cameronjade.macdonald@utoronto.ca
Aoife Josie Clements’ Persona (Little Puss Press, 2026)  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:
     Why might noise be queer?
     How is voice usually perceived in music? What might the distortion and non-human quality that hyperpop can lend voices signify in relation to transness?
     What does Jade say about remixes and covers? Do you see them as queer kinship?
     Why does Jade speak about 100 gecs? What is this example illustrating?
     Please listen to at least one musician that you heard about on this episode and think about whether you can hear any ‘alien resonances’.