“Gay’s joke engages the ‘liberating’ and ‘rebellious’ potential of Freud’s theory of humour to present a radically egalitarian politics.”
Category: Theory
[Essay] Race, Ethnicity and Queer Theology — Tom Hillsdon
“The theology of queer black scholars has moved the voices and experiences of queer black people from the margins to the centre.”
[Essay] On Affinity — Charles Bliss
“Neither animate nor inanimate, we vitalise these abstract forms like Dr Frankenstein.”
[Essay] Madness and Jouissance: Hölderlin, Benjamin and Hopkins — Josh Mcloughlin
“In Hopkins, the caesura constitutes the relationship between utterances, gives form to Gedichte, and reveals the intimate link between madness and jouissance.”
[Essay] Foucault, Sexuality and the ‘Confessing Animal’ — Josh Mcloughlin
“Perhaps most important is not the obligation or the frequency of confession, but what Foucault calls its ‘exhaustive’ quality.”
[Essay] Flat Affect as Deconstruction: Berlant, Derrida and Tilda Swinton — Josh Mcloughlin
“Swinton’s flat affect reiterates Butler’s always-already inscribed gendered body.”
[Essay] Subversive Cinema from Waters to Carax — Louis Armand
“Where cinema was, ego will be.”
[Essay] Queer Time in Woolf and Wilde — Josh Mcloughlin
“Muñoz’s theory is based on a flawed understanding of Heideggerian philosophy, because a truly ‘unbounded’ ontology would reject the very ‘equipmental’ being Heidegger attacks – and the utopianism Muñoz mistakenly celebrates.”
[Essay] Fade to Black: Film Noir and The Fatality of Genre — Louis Armand
“Reminiscent of Hemingway’s assault on overwritten, adjectival prose, noir is short on metaphysics and restricts its action to the surface of the image.”
[Essay] In Suspense of the Real: Cronenberg, Gilliam and Lynch — Louis Armand
“Concerned with the status of the ‘Real,’ these films are necessarily both self-reflexive and projective, folding the transcendental loop back on itself – from a dialectics of the ‘fable’ to the entropic spiral of the ‘image'”.
[Essay] Elizabethan Travel Writing and The Merchant of Venice — Josh Mcloughlin
“In the same way Edward Said describes orientalism as regulating otherness by ‘making statements about it, authorizing views about it, describing it,’ Shakespeare and Coryat fix Jewish visual and linguistic difference, the one theatrically, the other through ‘observation’”.
[Essay] Marooned Between Dreams and Reality: Surrealist Satire on Film — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“Surrealism’s preoccupation with the subconscious, and the gulf between dreams and reality, is writ large in Barton Fink’s implied insomnia.”
[Essay] Power, Possession and Monstrous Femininity — Victoria Griffin
“While the narrative ostensibly turns on a tale of demons, it symbolically reveals a social commentary on the state of female empowerment.”
[Essay] Floyd Mayweather: The Willing ‘Bastard’ of Boxing — Michael McGinley-Hughes
“His unmarked face, a benefit of his unparalleled defence, became the symbol of the audience’s disdain.”
[Essay] Pornoentropia — Louis Armand
“The nakedness of the image is always an interstice – something into which the visualization of desire is constantly projected in a type of pornographic monomania.”
[Essay] The Mythology of Starbucks — Maddy Howard
“Just as Barthes says the texture of steak, its sanguine juiciness, seem to be magically health-giving, the foamy, insubstantial milkiness of a cappuccino or latte has its own special sublimity.”
[Essay] On #YOLO — Charles Bliss
“In the face of the void of oblivion after death, YOLO is an exhortation to action-experience, a mindfulness of our own mortality.”
[Essay] Nationalism and the National Poet: Shakespeare, Lacan, and the Aphanisis of England — Josh Mcloughlin
“The history plays demonstrate Lacanian aphanisis on a national scale, disclosing the fundamental instability of all nationalisms and exposing the aporia at the heart of Englishness.”
