Saturday 6 - Sunday 7 February, 2021
3pm - 11.30pm each day
All access ticket with video replays £10 BUY HERE
SPEAKER ABSTRACTS
L.B. Limbrey (they/them): The Queer Body in the Landscape
Throughout history, the wild has been synonymous with the other in our narratives: fairies, werewolves, witches, vampires… Monsters and the mythic inherently subvert societal monoliths of gender and sexuality, especially though bodily transformations and narratives of giving in to a hidden true nature.
Looking at literature throughout the ages, we’ll see how queer bodies have been both demonised and desired, with an especial focus on Gawain and the Green Knight, Vampire and Werewolf narratives, and various folk tales and histories. We will see how changing views and anxieties around queer identity have developed through history, and how they are still relevant today.
Mx L.B. Limbrey (they/them) is a poet, prose writer and environmental activist with a BA in English with Creative Writing from Goldsmiths. They have work published in Rituals and Declarations, Dust Poetry, Corvid Queen, and Cypress Journal’s The Red House Anthology. They write Portent of the Day on twitter, and the Queer as Folklore blog, looking at queer identity through myth and folk tale.
Hannah O’Flanagan (she/her, they/them): Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories: black lesbian vampires and the inversion of the heteronormative family unit
In The Gilda Stories (1991), Jewelle Gomez recasts the vampire as a black lesbian to reclaim the myth from its white, masculine stereotype. Through this, Gomez explores race and sexuality and how they can be interlinked, as well as interrogating heteronormative notions of family. In her quest for identity and a sense of belonging, Gilda gathers and forms her own family units that are bound by blood in a sense separate from kinship and founded on non-patrilineal lines. This talk will therefore explore these family relationships, as well as race and sexuality, within The Gilda Stories.
Hannah O'Flanagan (she/her, they/them) is a recent graduate of the MLitt: The Gothic Imagination at the University of Stirling. She is hoping to undertake a PhD looking into the queerness of the ghost story in the Victorian and Edwardian period, and is very interested in non-normativity within the Gothic, Weird and Horror literature.
CM Wilson (they/them): Red as Blood, Adelaide as Snow: siblinghood and colour symbolism.
The use of red and white is a surefire— instinctual, perhaps— way to represent narrative counterparts in horror. This bond frequently takes the form of familial or pseudofamilial ties, whether through the torturous dual existence of Red and Adelaide or the rivalry of sisters-in-law and romantic opponents Edith and Lucille Sharpe. This is not an invention of the genre: the red/white dynamic is found in classic literature, folklore, and even alchemical practice.
As “a semiotic code visible throughout human history” (Woodbridge, 1987), the red/white dichotomy acts as an effective signifier that things are about to get personal.
CM Wilson (they/them) is a writer, researcher, and voracious reader. Their work has been published in The Selkie, Wizards in Space, and the Englewood Review. When they aren't writing books or writing about books, they prefer to spend their time playing RPGs and trying to propagate pothos leaves.
Noni Townshend (she/her/they/them): Finding Yourself in the Other: Queer Readings of HP Lovecraft
Despite his undeniable and marked influence on modern horror, HP Lovecraft is frequently known not only for his writing but also for his intense bigotry. This bigotry is seen through (among other things) his common use of a terrifying Other in his stories. However, a thread that is seen repeatedly in his work is protagonists discovering that they are of this Other. How do these narratives look when when we view them from a queer perspective? And might this viewing do something to explain why so many queer people seem drawn to Lovecraft’s work?
Noni Townshend is a queer theatre maker and spooky nerd based in Edinburgh. They have produced multiple horror themed plays, including an adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s short stories. When she isn’t obsessing over horror theory she is knitting, making soup or taking pictures of her cat.
C.H. Newell (he/him): The Queerness of Leatherface
The slasher Leatherface is a Queer Gothic victim of neoliberalism in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995). The original film takes place during the 1970s energy crisis, and its 1995 counterpart plays out during the neoliberal presidency of Bill Clinton. Leatherface—coded queer by a use masks, makeup, and lingerie—is able to explore new gender and sexual identities, yet he’s mired in hostile heteronormativity. His queerness is not villainous; his villainy is perpetuated by hetero family members. His family are the only ones who permit his queerness, albeit in a muted form of visual queer symbols rather than a wholly realised queer identity.
C.H. Newell is a queer academic currently working on a PhD in English at Memorial University of Newfoundland, concentrating on contemporary Queer Gothic literature as resistance to hetero-nationalism. His latest short story "At the Edge of Madness" was published in Terror Nova: An Anthology of Newfoundland Inspired Horror from Engen Books. He is a film critic and owner of the website Father Son Holy Gore. Most recently, his screenplay New Woman was made into a short film, which is currently playing film festivals worldwide.
Sarah Crowther (she/her): Drag Me to Hell: Representations of Drag & Transvestism in Horror Film & Television
From Ed Wood’s Glen Or Glenda (1953) to the Boulet Brothers’ Dragula (2017-), drag and transvestism have appeared as a recurring theme in genre cinema and television. This history of representation could be argued to have been broadly delineated into two categories: the ‘deviants’ and the divas. Appropriately, perhaps, the double-Ds. A recurrent representation of cross-dressing/gender subversion in horror has been that of the opposite gender embodying the protagonist’s murderous or ‘deviant’ impulses. Simultaneously, however, some of genre cinema’s greatest anti-heroes have simply just been transvestite (get over it), or played by iconic drag queens. Films explored will include Homicidal (1961) and Dressed to Kill (1983), alongside the televisual delights of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-) and Dragula (2017-).
Sarah Crowther is a lecturer, film programmer, curator and writer, specialising in horror. Until recently she was a lecturer in Media at Swansea University. She is about to submit her PhD which explores the cohesion between horror and comedy in film and television and includes a feature length film script. Sarah directed the 13th Fantastic Films Weekend at the National Media Museum and served on festival juries at Leeds International Film Festival and Celluloid Screams in Sheffield. She has written for Diabolique magazine and Metro among other publications. She also loves drag.
Katie Halinski (they/them): Queerness and Folk Horror in Medieval Poetry and Modern Cinema
This talk will have two parts. First, I will talk about the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight both as a text with queer elements, and as a text that shares elements with Adam Scovell’s ‘folk horror chain.’ Then, I’ll talk about how queerness and the pre-modern are portrayed in modern folk horror. In Penda’s Fen, queerness and the pre-modern go against the violent cisheteropatriarchal norms of the present day. The Witch, meanwhile, appears to present cisheteropatriarchal norms as the only possibility for women in pre-modern society. Overall, while both Penda’s Fen and The Witch use elements of pre-modern queerness, they oversimplify its narrative potential.
Katie Halinski (they/them) is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, where they are writing a PhD thesis on human-bird interactions in medieval Iceland and Scandinavia. Outside their day job, they also play bass and illustrate a zine of short stories written by Lawrence Harding.
Quen Took (they/them): “I Think She’s Starting To Suspect Something” – Hauntings, Warnings, And Women Supporting Women.
This talk explores the horror convention of a haunting as a warning, focussing particularly on women haunting women, and how this relates to the marginalisation and empowerment of women in horror and the Gothic. Drawing on movie texts such as Ju-On, What Lies Beneath, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca, we will deep-dive into the Othering of women as a source of empowerment and freedom, as well as a source of marginalisation and captivity, and how the living and the dead can ultimately band together against the real horror in their lives; the patriarchal oppression of men.
Quen Took (they/them) is a late-twenties horror fanghoul, with a BA in English and Creative Writing, and a deep interest in people who live in the margins. Their undergraduate dissertation focussed on women, horror, fertility, and the body. They have seven cats, passionately write fiction, and scare themselves into insomnia with horror books every night before bed.
Kai D’Argenta (he/him, they/them) Peter would cry over you: gender and sexuality in depictions of male werewolves in 21st century TV shows.
Werewolves are all kinds of liminal. But are they inherently queer? We'll probably be looking very briefly at Buffy and Being Human, then mostly focussing on The Order and Hemlock Grove. Content note for some plot spoilers, and mention of (within fiction) sexual assault and internalised homophobia.
About ten years ago Kai discovered queerness. He's since then also discovered werewolves, and hasn't ever really stopped thinking about either.
Hari Berrow (she/they) and Amira Krista (she/they): Love and Loss in Alice Isn't Dead
A spin-off of the wildly successful Welcome to Nightvale, Alice Isn’t Dead is one of the few mainstream narrative podcasts that centres a sapphic relationship. Much of the imagery in the series centres around grief and loss, and this talk will study how the blend of sci-fi and folk horror utilised not only creates a wider narrative, but the sense of betrayal, bereavement, and helplessness of the protagonist Keisha Taylor. The talk will, in addition, study the implications of straight male writers writing sapphic female characters, and study how influenced the character of Keisha may be by heteronormative expectations.
Amira Krista Calvo is a PhD student at Northumbria University researching child corporeal transgression in 1980s American biological horror cinema. They are a published author in the upcoming anthology The One That Got Away released by Kandisha Press. They are the founder and head editor of Horror Chromatic, a website dedicated to intersectionality and the representation of LGBTQIA, BIPOC and Disabled artists in the horror community. Their work has been featured in Horrorbound Blog, Death and the Maiden, BUST Magazine and The Huffington Post.
Hari is a Welsh scriptwriter and researcher based in South Wales. After graduating from Guildford School of Acting, she undertook a Creative Writing MA at the Open University, and she is now a PhD student at Cardiff University exploring how writers can utilise horror to explore mental health issues in scripted work. She is also currently undertaking additional postgraduate study in neurobiology and mental health sciences, to support the work she’ll be doing throughout her PhD.
3pm - 11.30pm each day
All access ticket with video replays £10 BUY HERE
SPEAKER ABSTRACTS
L.B. Limbrey (they/them): The Queer Body in the Landscape
Throughout history, the wild has been synonymous with the other in our narratives: fairies, werewolves, witches, vampires… Monsters and the mythic inherently subvert societal monoliths of gender and sexuality, especially though bodily transformations and narratives of giving in to a hidden true nature.
Looking at literature throughout the ages, we’ll see how queer bodies have been both demonised and desired, with an especial focus on Gawain and the Green Knight, Vampire and Werewolf narratives, and various folk tales and histories. We will see how changing views and anxieties around queer identity have developed through history, and how they are still relevant today.
Mx L.B. Limbrey (they/them) is a poet, prose writer and environmental activist with a BA in English with Creative Writing from Goldsmiths. They have work published in Rituals and Declarations, Dust Poetry, Corvid Queen, and Cypress Journal’s The Red House Anthology. They write Portent of the Day on twitter, and the Queer as Folklore blog, looking at queer identity through myth and folk tale.
Hannah O’Flanagan (she/her, they/them): Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories: black lesbian vampires and the inversion of the heteronormative family unit
In The Gilda Stories (1991), Jewelle Gomez recasts the vampire as a black lesbian to reclaim the myth from its white, masculine stereotype. Through this, Gomez explores race and sexuality and how they can be interlinked, as well as interrogating heteronormative notions of family. In her quest for identity and a sense of belonging, Gilda gathers and forms her own family units that are bound by blood in a sense separate from kinship and founded on non-patrilineal lines. This talk will therefore explore these family relationships, as well as race and sexuality, within The Gilda Stories.
Hannah O'Flanagan (she/her, they/them) is a recent graduate of the MLitt: The Gothic Imagination at the University of Stirling. She is hoping to undertake a PhD looking into the queerness of the ghost story in the Victorian and Edwardian period, and is very interested in non-normativity within the Gothic, Weird and Horror literature.
CM Wilson (they/them): Red as Blood, Adelaide as Snow: siblinghood and colour symbolism.
The use of red and white is a surefire— instinctual, perhaps— way to represent narrative counterparts in horror. This bond frequently takes the form of familial or pseudofamilial ties, whether through the torturous dual existence of Red and Adelaide or the rivalry of sisters-in-law and romantic opponents Edith and Lucille Sharpe. This is not an invention of the genre: the red/white dynamic is found in classic literature, folklore, and even alchemical practice.
As “a semiotic code visible throughout human history” (Woodbridge, 1987), the red/white dichotomy acts as an effective signifier that things are about to get personal.
CM Wilson (they/them) is a writer, researcher, and voracious reader. Their work has been published in The Selkie, Wizards in Space, and the Englewood Review. When they aren't writing books or writing about books, they prefer to spend their time playing RPGs and trying to propagate pothos leaves.
Noni Townshend (she/her/they/them): Finding Yourself in the Other: Queer Readings of HP Lovecraft
Despite his undeniable and marked influence on modern horror, HP Lovecraft is frequently known not only for his writing but also for his intense bigotry. This bigotry is seen through (among other things) his common use of a terrifying Other in his stories. However, a thread that is seen repeatedly in his work is protagonists discovering that they are of this Other. How do these narratives look when when we view them from a queer perspective? And might this viewing do something to explain why so many queer people seem drawn to Lovecraft’s work?
Noni Townshend is a queer theatre maker and spooky nerd based in Edinburgh. They have produced multiple horror themed plays, including an adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s short stories. When she isn’t obsessing over horror theory she is knitting, making soup or taking pictures of her cat.
C.H. Newell (he/him): The Queerness of Leatherface
The slasher Leatherface is a Queer Gothic victim of neoliberalism in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995). The original film takes place during the 1970s energy crisis, and its 1995 counterpart plays out during the neoliberal presidency of Bill Clinton. Leatherface—coded queer by a use masks, makeup, and lingerie—is able to explore new gender and sexual identities, yet he’s mired in hostile heteronormativity. His queerness is not villainous; his villainy is perpetuated by hetero family members. His family are the only ones who permit his queerness, albeit in a muted form of visual queer symbols rather than a wholly realised queer identity.
C.H. Newell is a queer academic currently working on a PhD in English at Memorial University of Newfoundland, concentrating on contemporary Queer Gothic literature as resistance to hetero-nationalism. His latest short story "At the Edge of Madness" was published in Terror Nova: An Anthology of Newfoundland Inspired Horror from Engen Books. He is a film critic and owner of the website Father Son Holy Gore. Most recently, his screenplay New Woman was made into a short film, which is currently playing film festivals worldwide.
Sarah Crowther (she/her): Drag Me to Hell: Representations of Drag & Transvestism in Horror Film & Television
From Ed Wood’s Glen Or Glenda (1953) to the Boulet Brothers’ Dragula (2017-), drag and transvestism have appeared as a recurring theme in genre cinema and television. This history of representation could be argued to have been broadly delineated into two categories: the ‘deviants’ and the divas. Appropriately, perhaps, the double-Ds. A recurrent representation of cross-dressing/gender subversion in horror has been that of the opposite gender embodying the protagonist’s murderous or ‘deviant’ impulses. Simultaneously, however, some of genre cinema’s greatest anti-heroes have simply just been transvestite (get over it), or played by iconic drag queens. Films explored will include Homicidal (1961) and Dressed to Kill (1983), alongside the televisual delights of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-) and Dragula (2017-).
Sarah Crowther is a lecturer, film programmer, curator and writer, specialising in horror. Until recently she was a lecturer in Media at Swansea University. She is about to submit her PhD which explores the cohesion between horror and comedy in film and television and includes a feature length film script. Sarah directed the 13th Fantastic Films Weekend at the National Media Museum and served on festival juries at Leeds International Film Festival and Celluloid Screams in Sheffield. She has written for Diabolique magazine and Metro among other publications. She also loves drag.
Katie Halinski (they/them): Queerness and Folk Horror in Medieval Poetry and Modern Cinema
This talk will have two parts. First, I will talk about the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight both as a text with queer elements, and as a text that shares elements with Adam Scovell’s ‘folk horror chain.’ Then, I’ll talk about how queerness and the pre-modern are portrayed in modern folk horror. In Penda’s Fen, queerness and the pre-modern go against the violent cisheteropatriarchal norms of the present day. The Witch, meanwhile, appears to present cisheteropatriarchal norms as the only possibility for women in pre-modern society. Overall, while both Penda’s Fen and The Witch use elements of pre-modern queerness, they oversimplify its narrative potential.
Katie Halinski (they/them) is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, where they are writing a PhD thesis on human-bird interactions in medieval Iceland and Scandinavia. Outside their day job, they also play bass and illustrate a zine of short stories written by Lawrence Harding.
Quen Took (they/them): “I Think She’s Starting To Suspect Something” – Hauntings, Warnings, And Women Supporting Women.
This talk explores the horror convention of a haunting as a warning, focussing particularly on women haunting women, and how this relates to the marginalisation and empowerment of women in horror and the Gothic. Drawing on movie texts such as Ju-On, What Lies Beneath, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca, we will deep-dive into the Othering of women as a source of empowerment and freedom, as well as a source of marginalisation and captivity, and how the living and the dead can ultimately band together against the real horror in their lives; the patriarchal oppression of men.
Quen Took (they/them) is a late-twenties horror fanghoul, with a BA in English and Creative Writing, and a deep interest in people who live in the margins. Their undergraduate dissertation focussed on women, horror, fertility, and the body. They have seven cats, passionately write fiction, and scare themselves into insomnia with horror books every night before bed.
Kai D’Argenta (he/him, they/them) Peter would cry over you: gender and sexuality in depictions of male werewolves in 21st century TV shows.
Werewolves are all kinds of liminal. But are they inherently queer? We'll probably be looking very briefly at Buffy and Being Human, then mostly focussing on The Order and Hemlock Grove. Content note for some plot spoilers, and mention of (within fiction) sexual assault and internalised homophobia.
About ten years ago Kai discovered queerness. He's since then also discovered werewolves, and hasn't ever really stopped thinking about either.
Hari Berrow (she/they) and Amira Krista (she/they): Love and Loss in Alice Isn't Dead
A spin-off of the wildly successful Welcome to Nightvale, Alice Isn’t Dead is one of the few mainstream narrative podcasts that centres a sapphic relationship. Much of the imagery in the series centres around grief and loss, and this talk will study how the blend of sci-fi and folk horror utilised not only creates a wider narrative, but the sense of betrayal, bereavement, and helplessness of the protagonist Keisha Taylor. The talk will, in addition, study the implications of straight male writers writing sapphic female characters, and study how influenced the character of Keisha may be by heteronormative expectations.
Amira Krista Calvo is a PhD student at Northumbria University researching child corporeal transgression in 1980s American biological horror cinema. They are a published author in the upcoming anthology The One That Got Away released by Kandisha Press. They are the founder and head editor of Horror Chromatic, a website dedicated to intersectionality and the representation of LGBTQIA, BIPOC and Disabled artists in the horror community. Their work has been featured in Horrorbound Blog, Death and the Maiden, BUST Magazine and The Huffington Post.
Hari is a Welsh scriptwriter and researcher based in South Wales. After graduating from Guildford School of Acting, she undertook a Creative Writing MA at the Open University, and she is now a PhD student at Cardiff University exploring how writers can utilise horror to explore mental health issues in scripted work. She is also currently undertaking additional postgraduate study in neurobiology and mental health sciences, to support the work she’ll be doing throughout her PhD.