Queer Joy: Taking Up Space

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In this four-part podcast series on Queer Activisms, historians, performers, educators and activists take a deep dive into existence and resistance in queer life – past and present.

In our first episode, Laura Forster is joined by Shay Shay, Tim Other and Dr Fiona Anderson to discuss Queer Joy. Together, these artists, activists and historians talk about performance and community, and how they relate to precarity, gentrification and dispossession. Ranging from 1970s New York to Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK, this episode explores where queer creativity is forged in the margins and considers the importance of taking up space.

History Workshop Podcast · Queer Joy: Taking Up Space

Introduced by Marybeth Hamilton | Audio Production: May Robson

Laura Forster

Laura C. Forster is an editorial fellow at HWO and a post-doc at Birkbeck, working on progressive ideas and internationalism in early twentieth-century Britain. She is writing a book on the political exiles of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the longer intellectual and cultural afterlives of the Commune in Britain, provisionally titled The Paris Commune in Britain: Radicals, Refugees, and Revolutionaries since 1871. Laura is interested in histories of transnational activism, informal cultures of political and intellectual exchange, the social history of ideas, political exile, and queer spaces past and present. She tweets @lauracforster

Tim Other

Tim Other is founder and director of Raze Collective – a charity established in 2015 to support and nurture queer performers and performance. The Collective’s work includes producing shows, commissioning artists, running workshops and campaigning to protect and preserve queer spaces.

Fiona Anderson

Dr Fiona Anderson is Senior Lecturer in Art History at Newcastle University. Her work explores queer preservation and world making, gentrification and the politics of urban space, mostly in the USA and the UK. She is the author of Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019). From 2016-2019, she was the UK Principal Investigator for Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures – a special issue of Third Text on the theme of ‘Imagining Queer Europe’, co-edited with Glyn Davis and Nat Raha, was published in January 2021.

ShayShay

ShayShay is a half-Irish half-Japanese non-binary nightlife producer, drag artist, writer and director working to empower London’s queer community through entertainment and education. They are dedicated to raising marginalised voices, creating platforms for diverse representation and educating children and families. ShayShay is one of the founders of the Pan-Asian cabaret collective The Bitten Peach , and has produced and directed shows with the Bitten Peach at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, The National Theatre, and the Underbelly Festival.

One Comment

Arthur Corbin says:

4 years ago

Wonderful. Thank you.

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