Current Playlist 

--- abstracts / biographies  ---

Dolly’s ‘Coat of Many Colors’: The Gay Country Anthem
 James Barker
 Newcastle University, United Kingdom

Day 1 - Event 2 / 14:00 – 15:30 Session A / Anthems, Icons and Affinities

Dolly Parton has a reputation as a gay icon and LGBTQ+ ally, which is perceived to be unusual within the genre of country music. More recent scholarship on country music (Hubbs, 2014; Royster, 2017) and Parton more specifically (Hubbs, 2015; Edwards, 2018; Hamessley, 2021) has challenged political, social and cultural assumptions and stereotypes about country music’s homophobia. The mainstream country music industry does lack LGBTQ+ representation, but there are a number of LGBTQ+ artists performing and recording in the genre, and there is an increasingly visible LGBTQ+ audience. Outspoken allies like Parton enable LGBTQ+ audiences to consider country music as being relatable to their lives. Parton is arguably the most widely recognised LGBTQ+ ally within the genre. However this paper will make the case that Parton expresses her LGBTQ+ advocacy as part of country music’s aesthetic, musical and affective conventions, rather than as an exception to them, focusing on the song ‘Coat of Many Colors’. ‘Coat of Many Colors’ has been described by Parton herself as being about ‘acceptance, it’s ok to be different’. The affective content of the song resonates with discourses of pride, and additionally the ‘coat of many colors’ also visually resembles an LGBTQ+ pride flag. These narratives and affective logics of pride and self-acceptance are brought into direct conversation with Parton’s autobiography: growing up in poverty in rural Appalachia, as well as country music’s narratives of storytelling around working class America and the melody unfolds within the country music ballad conventions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through this song Parton makes a claim for LGBTQ+ inclusion being consistent with the logics and values of country music. This paper will use a close reading of Parton’s ‘Coat of Many Colors’ to demonstrate how Parton welcomes LGBTQ+ audiences into the genre of country music. This will draw on the work of Sherry Turkle (2007) around the idea of ‘the evocative object’, where objects evoke memories and become companions to our emotional lives. The paper will build on this work using Sara Ahmed’s (2017) idea of ‘companion texts’ being essential to the building and sustaining of feminist communities in order to withstand hostile environments. I will argue that just as Parton’s coat becomes a ‘companion to thought’ and a ‘life companion’ (Turkle, 2007) in the song, Parton’s retelling of the story in this song itself becomes an evocative object for LGBTQ+ listeners. Parton’s anthem of self-acceptance becomes a companion text for LGBTQ+ audiences to navigate country music, and for LGBTQ+ artists and audiences this becomes a gateway for LGBTQ+ to hear the potential to be represented and to assert their presence in the genre. 

James Barker is a PhD student at Newcastle University, UK. His PhD explores LGBTQ+ inclusion in country music, using Dolly Parton as a key case study. His research focuses on the ways country artists and audiences navigate and shape the genre’s aesthetic, political and industry dynamics, informed by a queer theoretical framework. He has presented his work at the International Country Music Conference. James is also a Staff Writer for Country Queer, an online publication focused on elevating LGBTQ+ voices in country music and Americana, specialising in the role of queer icons and allies, and covering awards shows, such as the Country Music Association Awards.

Renegade or Retrograde: Questioning Little Richard's Legacy
 Jacob Bloomfield
 University of Konstanz, Germany

Day 1 - Event 2 / 14:00 – 15:30 Session A / Anthems, Icons and Affinities

In the many retrospectives on musician Little Richard since his death last year, two major narratives have emerged: Richard as a queer forefather who broke racial, gender, and/or sexual boundaries, and Richard as a musical innovator. But in exalting the singer as a boundary breaker, observers have overlooked retrograde elements of Richard's legacy: his consciously evocated tropes of minstrelsy, what literary critic W. T. Lhamon, Jr. terms ‘Sambo foolery,’ as well as his use of sexual and gender ambiguity to temper the sexual threat of Black masculinity as perceived by white audiences. In this presentation, I propose a path towards acknowledging and reconciling the complexity of Richard's legacy as a trailblazing source of inspiration to present-day observers and as a figure who satiated reactionary cultural values of the past. This presentation does not refute the transgressive or prescient aspects of Richard’s career, but places them in a broader historical context which reveals how, in mid-twentieth-century American popular culture, theatrical gender variance was not always a subversive phenomenon, and that the legacy of minstrelsy in Western cultural heritage is enormous and often unnoticed or overlooked. I urge historians and cultural critics, and attentive listeners, to consider the complexity of Richard’s legacy.

Dr Jacob Bloomfield is a Zukunftskolleg Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Konstanz and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent. Jacob’s research is situated primarily in the fields of Cultural History, the History of Sexuality, and Gender History. Jacob is currently working on a first monograph with University of California Press on the history of drag performance in modern Britain, as well as a separate book project on the career and legacy of musician Little Richard.

“Getting to the bottom”: searching for the Brothers Butch
Kit Fryatt
Dublin City University, Ireland

Day 2 - Event 13 / 16:00 – 17:00 Session D / Gutter Glitter: Narrative Enquiry and Poetry

In 1967, the year of the passage of the Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised some sexual activity between men in England and Wales, a novelty single was released by the hitherto unknown—and never to be seen again—Thrust Records. The A-side was a track entitled ‘Kay, Why?’, the B-side ‘I’m Not Going Camping This Winter’. The name of the recording artists was given on the sleeve as The Brothers Butch, and on the record itself as the Butch Brothers. Both tracks were credited to the writing genius of one Eileen Dover. The cover art features a photograph of a hand holding a tube of lubricant, from which drips hand-drawn lettering delineating the A-side title. Just in case anyone was in any doubt about exactly what sort of record this was. According to music journalist Jon Savage, who included it in his compilation album Queer Noises 1961-78: From the Closet to the Charts (2006), ‘“Kay Why?” defines relentlessness” in its series of puns on the best-known brand of lube. ‘Featuring plodding beat group instrumentation and Beatle-like “oohs”’ it’s certainly no musical masterpiece, though as Savage continues, it might be said to ‘illustrate a new confidence’ and openness in queer expression. But who were the Brothers Butch, who name themselves as ‘George’ and ‘Clarence’ on the track itself? Who was their ‘plodding’ backing instrumentalist? No-one seems to know. Savage received a copy of the single as a gift, but `could find out no more than the (mostly pseudonymous and jocose) information on the record itself. The only clue was the address on the sleeve: 494 Harrow Road, W9, which in 1967 did house an independent record label, albeit one that seemed quite remote in its specialist interests from Thrust Records. This paper — part lyrical essay, part close reading, part detective story — is an account of my search for the Brothers Butch, beginning with an address which is now a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Maida Vale, proceeding through the archives of a Welsh studio specialising in theatrical organ music to—well, who knows where, except this time I’m determined not to let ‘Kay, Why?’ slip through my fingers. Works Cited Savage, Jon. Liner notes. Queer Noises 1961-78: From the Closet to the Charts. Music by Various Artists, Trikont 2006. CD.

Dr Kit Fryatt is a lecturer in the School of English at Dublin City University. His most recent book of poems is Bodyservant (Shearsman, 2018) and last year he published a monograph on the Irish poet Austin Clarke with Aberdeen University Press. 

The National Gay Federation & Dance Music in Ireland
Ann Marie Hanlon
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland

Day 2 - Event 9 / 11:30 – 13:00 Session C / Dancefloor Transgressions

Necessitated by the social, legal and political alienation of homosexuals within Irish society, queer club culture emerged in tandem with the Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM) in the 1970s. The initial impetus for establishing queer club culture(s) in Ireland went much further than social and musical concerns, and it is not a coincidence that this culture is initially located in Dublin in Ireland’s earliest gay community centres. Ireland’s first dedicated queer club space was opened on St Patrick’s Day 1979, as part of the newly established Hirschfeld Centre in Temple Bar run by the National Gay Federation (NGF). In keeping with the politicised name of the Centre (Magnus Hirschfeld was a gay Jewish German sexologist), its Friday and Saturday club nights were named Flikkers, the Dutch for the homophobic pejorative ‘faggot.’ This provocative name betrays the political conviction in queer politics that underpinned the club’s conception and its management. The initial soundtrack to this socialization and politicization of the Irish LGBT community had a distinct sonic identity, primarily comprising disco and early house music. This was facilitated by the NGF, which set aside a significant budget each week to procure music for its club. Through a combination of archival research and oral history gathered through interviews with DJs and gay rights activists, this research explores the importance of club nights in the Hirschfeld Centre (1979-1987), their sonic identity and specifically, the personal and social meaning attached to the music played there by its attendees in the period before decriminalization of male homosexuality in Ireland. not a gendered concept’. I claim that both films point to the ongoing role of music in eliciting that utopian model of teen counterculture, of pleasure and identification across difference, which has not altogether disappeared from the contemporary moment – despite how teen culture is often represented in the dominant media outlets of today.

Dr Ann-Marie Hanlon (PhD, Newcastle) is a musicologist with specialisms in cultural theories of music, popular music and French modernism. She is a Lecturer of Music at Dundalk Institute of Technology, where she teaches popular musicology and performance. Her most recent research projects include the nationwide study Gendered Experiences of the Irish Music Industry, the first national study on how gender impacts’ musicians’ day-to-day experiences on the island of Ireland. Her research in popular music focuses on the area of music and social change, and explores the ways in which music is utilised in a political sense in relation to women’s rights and within queer culture in Ireland and in the U.S.. Her work can be found in a range of publications including in the books Media Narratives in Popular Music (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021), Made in Ireland: Popular Music Studies (Routledge, 2020); and Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl (Bloomsbury, 2018).

The Other of the Other's Other:
Constructing the Soundtrack of a Transgender Person in Ireland
Lee Harding
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland
 
Day 1 - Event 4 / 16:00 – 17:30 Session B / Music as Resistance from the Margins
 

“The Other of the Other’s Other: Constructing the Soundtrack of a Transgender Person in Ireland” seeks to remedy an aspect of the invisibility surrounding the musical lives of transgender people in Ireland. Otherness and marginalisation are a familiarity for Irish people, which is what Price (2013) refers to in how Ireland’s status ‘as a colonial “other” rendered her perpetually queer and outside the realms of the normative imperial centre’. This otherness is a central concept discussed in relation to queer theory in academia, particularly the othering of the queer community as something ‘outside’ of the binary understandings of heterosexuality and how queer existence threatens a collapse of boundaries and ‘a radical confusion of identities’ (Fuss, 1991). This othering is still an issue as can be seen in the cutting down and burning of pride flags erected in Waterford City Hall and the appearance of Straight Pride posters (Brent, 2021), along with the words ‘Pedo Bar’ painted on the wall of a building with an arrow pointed directly towards PantiBar, a known gay bar in Dublin (Burns, 2021). This othering continues even within queer groups, such as The LGB Alliance in Ireland, who position themselves in opposition to the rights of transgender people (Black 2020). In relation to the othering of transgender people in music scenes, there is little understanding surrounding the musical lives of transgender people in Ireland and studies on LGBTQ+ music fandom often focus exclusively on gay and lesbian icons and overlook those of other identities. This presentation explores the genres, songs and artists that have influenced and resonated with transgender people in Ireland informed by a survey conducted in 2021. The survey asks about the role of music in their lives, about transgender musical icons within Ireland and internationally and about their involvement in various music venues, scenes and communities in Ireland. This paper will primarily explore what music is significant within Irish transgender people’s lives, the contexts within which it is consumed and understood and how musical fandom intersects with their concept of gender identity.

Lee Harding is a second-year postgraduate research student at Dundalk Institute of Technology. He is a classically trained singer with interests in conducting, performance, composition, education and musicology. In 2020, he completed his BA (Hons) degree in Applied Music from Dundalk Institute of Technology with a first class honours. His undergraduate dissertation was focused on The Transgender Voice: How Ireland Can Turn Up The Volume which discussed the training of a transgender person’s voice as one method of inclusion for Irish transgender students in the music classroom. He is the second prize winner of the CHMHE Undergraduate Musicology Competition 2020 and is the recipient of the 2019 Van Dessel Choral Conducting Scholar Award. His interests in musicology include queer musicology, historical musicology, gender studies, popular musicology and education. His current research is entitled The Spaces on the Stave: Documenting the Musical Lives of Transgender People in Ireland which is an interdisciplinary project that will document the social history, mapping and musical lives of transgender people in Ireland.

How Hyperpop Duo 100 Gecs Queers Genre and Gender
Miles Luce
University of Kansas, United States of America

Day 1 - Event 4 / 16:00 – 17:30 Session B / Music as Resistance from the Margins 

My article seeks to track the queer relations to genre and vocality embodied by contemporary hyperpop duo, 100 gecs. I argue that 100 gecs initiates a nomadic approach to genre through absurdism and parody. Furthermore, I describe how 100 gecs’ use of vocal modulation resists gender’s construction of the masculine and feminine voice. I conclude with a meditation on “gec” feminism that attempts to follow the ethic of hyperpop for articulating a wacky, yet subversive genre of (un-)academic writing. My investigation of 100 gecs’ album, 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues is a cross-disciplinary exercise in queer theory, gender studies, musicology, art history, and philosophy. The article primarily contributes to queer theory discourses on genre, gender, art, and the body.

Miles Luce is an undergraduate student at the University of Kansas, Honors College. They graduated from the Barstow School in Kansas City, Missouri in May 2020. They are currently studying Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Art History. Their current research on Druze women and gender in Druze society, mentored by Dr. Rami Zeedan, is at the intersection of gender studies and anthropology. In Spring 2021, they attended the University of Kansas’ undergraduate research symposium, received an undergraduate research award, and was published by KU’s Zenith! Undergraduate Research Journal. They also produced KU’s 2021 TEDxKU event, “Momentum.” In Fall 2021, Miles will become Editor-in-Chief of Zenith! and work as a seminar assistant to Dr. Celka Straughn of the Spencer Museum of Art.

The Farmer’s Seduction: How Mylène Farmer Made Me the Faggot I am Today
 Pierre Niedergang
 Université Paris Nanterre, France
 
Day 1 - Event 2 / 14:00 – 15:30 Session A / Anthems, Icons and Affinities 

This contribution aims to show how pop music and pop icons can influence the construction of the sexual dimension of the psyche by drawing on a personal example. I propose to look at my own relationship as a child to French pop singer Mylène Farmer using the psychoanalytic theory of seduction as developed by Jean Laplanche (2007) together with queer theory and cultural critical theory. One of the major theoretical moves proposed by Laplanche is to reactivate the theory of seduction that was constructed by Freud in his earliest works but subsequently abandoned as part of what Laplanche refers to as his “biological drift” (Laplanche 2006). The laplanchian version of seduction holds that sexual drives, and the sexual dimension in general, are not the result of biological instincts, but are rather produced by the “implantation” in the child’s psyche of “unconsciously corrupted messages” (i.e. corrupted by the unconscious of the adult) which the child is unable to assimilate because of the infantile lack of symbolization ability. These seduction messages, which are implanted in the child but not understood by them, are the source of their sexual drives. Weaving together Laplanche and queer theory (De Lauretis 1993), I want to go a step further and ask if those messages are limited to the child’s relations with close adults (parents or others) or if such “unconsciously corrupted messages” might also be produced by cultural objects such as pop songs. If, as Laplanche suggests, the sexual dimension is the result of intersubjective communication, and if the intersubjective world of the child is not limited to other people but extends to cultural objects (music, cartoon, films, images, etc.), is it possible that seduction could be the result of messages originating from a variety of cultural objects? To explore this hypothetical “cultural seduction”, my relationship to Mylène Farmer represents an interesting case study. At four years old, I was already a big fan of Mylène, happily singing along to lyrics such as “I am a libertine, I am a harlot” or “Your Kama Sutra is way out of date […] you’re better off if you like it both ways”. These are clearly examples of sexually “corrupted” messages that are beyond the understanding of a 4-year-old child, but are still implanted in them. In opposition to the excessive focus in psychoanalysis on sight, le regard (Lacan 1973), cultural seduction offers an opportunity for rethinking the question of hearing and the voice in relation to sexual desire (Lacan 2004 ; Silverman 1988) and weaving those questions with cultural and political reflexions. Indeed, if the cultural seduction hypothesis holds, how might it help us reconsider the cultural and political normalization of desire? Is it possible that seduction is not only the source of the sexual dimension but is also, at the same time, the source of the introjection of sexual norms into this dimension? If this were to be the case, cultural seduction could be a useful tool for thinking through interdependence linking the desiring subject and norms (Butler 1997), and the ways that processes of subversion of these norms can occur. What does it mean to say that Mylène Farmer made me a faggot? To what extent was the reproduction/repetition of heteronormativity disrupted by my childhood passion for Mylène?

Doctoral candidate in Philosophy since September 2009, I am working on the immanent relationship between Power and Desire, weaving together French philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault), Psychoanalysis (Lacan, Laplanche, Ettinger) and Queer and Trans* Theory (De Lauretis, Butler, Muñoz, Chu, etc.). I am especially interested five problems that concern the Power-Desire relationship: The Drive/Affect problem, the Power/Domination problem, the question of the role of the Imaginary, the problem of the Real, and the problem of the relationship between desire and gender/sex. 

Last Night a DJ Saved my Life:
Disco-vering Queer Mental Health Support on the Dancefloor
Ray O’Neill
 Dublin City University, Ireland
 
Day 2 - Event 9 / 11:30 – 13:00 Session C / Dancefloor Transgressions

Each Generation of LGBT folk have their anthems, their Divas, their poster bands, their rebel icons. Before AppLand's increasing overcolonisation of LGBT sexual terrain, it was either the dance floor or cottaging sites where gyrating bodies got to make music together. The realms of music, have always held a space for minorities to find a voice, to express their bodies, and enact something of their desires. Thus, from a mental health and well-being perspective, more people found release, relief, communion, and each other on the dance floors than many other places. The Stonewall riots erupted not only because folk had had enough but because their cultural celebratory music filled space was being invaded. This presentation offers a discussion around the value of the dancefloors for us historically, culturally, and in a mid-COVID era within which Apps were already consuming us and our cultural spaces and communities, it asks what do Dancefloors still have to offer, particularly with/from a queer personal and community perspective. Your Disco may still need you, but do we still need it?

Dr Ray O’Neill is Assistant Professor in Psychotherapy with DCU's School of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health and a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice working mainly, but not exclusively within the LGBTQ community, where he has acted as a director of the Gay Switchboard Dublin, an LGBTQ social advocate and featured writer with Gay Community News. He has worked as a Research Associate with the Centre for Gender and Women Studies at Trinity College Dublin. As a psychoanalyst, he writes extensively on the gay position for analyses and analysts within psychoanalytic discourse and practice with his DCU doctoral research exploring the subjectivities involved and imposed on men in being called ‘homosexual’. As one of Ireland’s few resident male Agony Aunts, a regular contributor to The Ray Darcy Show, and co-fronting RTE’s Then Comes Marriage Ray works significantly (and sometimes with significance) with the media in discoursing love, relationships, and desire in the twenty-first century. Current research explores relationships between desire and contemporary modern technologies; and the individual and collective transmission of trauma across generations, with particular emphasis on the Irish Famine experiences. Recent publications include 'Tá an Neamhchomhfhiosach Struchtúrtha mar Theanga: If the Unconscious Is Structured Like a Language, How Might Speaking in Tongues Indicate Something Singular in the Structurings of an Irish Gaelic Unconscious?' published in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Palgrave, July 2020. “‘Tá Súil Agam’: Deadly Visions of History in Ireland” ABEI Journal, Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses, The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 20.3, December 2019. "The Sons of the Father Fall on the Sin: Wilde Trauma across Generations": Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexuality to be published by CUP, Summer 2021. “Double, Double, Toil and Trouble; Psychoanalysis Burn and Surrealism Bubble"; Book Chapter published in Fenris Wolf, Trapart Books, 2017. His clinical website is available on www.machna.ie

Not a Girl, Not yet a Woman:
Pop Icons and Cross-gender Identification in Contemporary Films about Adolescence
Katherine Parker Hay
University of Sussex, United Kingdom

Day 2 - Event 9 / 11:30 – 13:00 Session C / Dancefloor Transgressions

Unlike other social movements of the twentieth century, youth countercultures were not structured in the first place by a stable, separatist identity. Indeed, as ethnographer of 1950s teen culture Collin MacInnes observed, the first generation of teenagers rejected the idea that gender, nation but especially class constituted a meaningful barrier in the world they would collectively create. They turned their back on the politics of their parents in favour of cultural revolution, with pop music key to breaking barriers and fostering a collective ‘underground of joy’ for everyone and anyone under the age of thirty. Drawing on Joyce Carol Oates harrowing cautionary tale “Where are you going, where have you been?”, whose girl-teen protagonist of 1963 is seduced by a predator disguised as a teenage boy, this paper will begin by establishing that the twentieth century taught women over and again that this utopian countercultural dream often allowed sexual exploitation to slip in through the back door. I will also venture that, quite the reverse of the emergent culture that MacInnes observed, teens of today have so thoroughly learnt this lesson, that political sensitivity has become a badge of group belonging (much to the ire of the right-wing media). In the second half of this paper, I look at two more recent films which incorporate this lesson and take an intersectional approach to interrogate how gender, race and capitalism structure in advance one’s experience of adolescence: Harmony Korine’s 2013 Spring Breakers and Céline Sciamma’s 2014 Girlhood. Both look at the minoritarian experience of being a racialised and feminised teenage girl. However, though both films are grounded in an exploration of identity, their use of iconic pop songs from Britney Spears and Rhianna as part of the story line index a different model of identity, one which uses the figure of “the girl” to inspire identification which crosses gender and race; “the girl” here signifies something different than either “man” or “woman”, “black” or “white” – echoing, I will argue, Tiqqun’s 1990s paradoxical declaration that ‘The Young-Girl is obviously not a gendered concept’. I claim that both films point to the ongoing role of music in eliciting that utopian model of teen counterculture, of pleasure and identification across difference, which has not altogether disappeared from the contemporary moment – despite how teen culture is often represented in the dominant media outlets of today. 

Katherine Parker-Hay teaches at University of Sussex and specialises in gender, sexuality, and affect. She has a PhD from Sussex which looked at minor genres of queer theory. She has worked with the NHS to develop creative writing workshops as an alternative to medication for people experiencing anxiety and depression and with Vitae on a report which investigates PhD supervisory relationships. She is currently working with Brighton University on a report which looks at gender representation in their student body.

"Transition from Nowhere, to Nowhere" - Punk and Trans Negativity
Jay Szpilka
University of Warsaw, Poland

Day 1 - Event 4 / 16:00 – 17:30 Session B / Music as Resistance from the Margins 

Punk recurs in the context of transness, in narratives as well as in theory. From Die! Die! Die!’s lyrics serving as an epigraph to Imogen Binnie’s cult novel Nevada, through invocations of punk spirit in Paul B. Preciado’s famous Testo Junkie, all the way to the trans indie video game productions such as Heather Flower’s EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER series, it seems clear that there is something particularly resonant about the punk style for the trans people. But what is that something? Although transness (mostly as adjacent to queerness) is increasingly an object of scholarly attention, the focus remains on queer and trans punk as a site of resistance. For such scholarship, queer and trans punk (as a music, a subculture, an ethos) stands for an energy facilitating resistance to and offering tools for subverting the cis/heterosexist order of the society. Such a perspective, however, seems to remain blind to the other aspect of how punk and trans in particular can resonate together. Perhaps what speaks to transness the most in punk is not the legacy of punk as the combat rock, but rather of punk as the music and style of alienation, depression and the sense of stucknss. Drawing on both Heather Love’s attention to negativity as a constitutive element of queer history and experience and Jack Halberstam’s investigation into the art of failure, as well as personal experiences with transness in relationship to punk, I would like to propose that punk history of problematizing and expressing “negative” feelings of directionlessneess, impasse, and helplessness can be a vital part of why so many trans people find punk resonating with their lived experiences. Instead of investigating trans punk as a resistance, I want to attend to its resonance with the familiar trans experience of - to call on a formulation shared by both Fugazi and Andrea Long Chu - living your life in waiting rooms, in frustrated anticipation, and amidst a profound sense of lost chances. 

Jay Szpilka (she/they) in a PhD candidate at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw in Poland. They are currently working on a dissertation on the anthropology and politics of BDSM practice in Poland. Main research areas are anthropology of sexuality, trans studies and punk history and culture.