Centre for Translating Cultures

October 22nd, Digital Humanities, Seminar Room 2: Professor João Florêncio (Linköping University, Sweden)

Porn, Pedophilia, and Paganism: The Transnational Far-Right European Imaginary of Gaie France Magazine (1986–1994) 

Professor João Florêncio (Linköping University, Sweden) will describe how, on July 11th, 1992, eighteen years after the Carnation Revolution ended the fascist dictatorship in Portugal, the Portuguese public broadcaster ran a news story about the launch of the first ever gay magazine to reach Portuguese newsstands, one that was written in Portuguese despite still bearing the title of its parent publication, Gaie France. Five years earlier, on July 13th, 1987, however, a petition had been signed at the Université d’Été Homosexuelle de Marseille denouncing Gaie France’s fascist politics.  

In this talk, I offer a critical picture of Gaie France’s peculiar place in the landscape of late 20^th-century homosexual media in Europe. I show how the magazine advocated a complext ideology that mixed paganism, pederasty, and far-right ideology, trying to spearhead a radical conservative European homosexual movement while having to deal with the view of homosexuality as degeneracy shared by the main ideologues of the European far-right. Rejected by political actors both in the organised homosexual movement and in the Nouvelle Right, Gaie France forged a peculiar ideological path that can help us gain a more nuanced understanding of both the European homosexual movement and of Europe itself at the turn of the new millennium.   

Bio: 

João Florêncio is Professor of Gender Studies (Sex Media & Sex Cultures) at Linköping University, Sweden, where he also coordinates NordSex: Nordic Research Network on Sexuality, Media and Culture. A queer cultural scholar of embodiment and sexuality, his research focuses on the interfacing between the body, media technologies, and sex in modern and contemporary cultures. His work has been supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal), the AHRC (UK), the Chaire de Recherche TRADIS (Canada), and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden). He is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (Routledge, 2020), and—with artist Liz Rosenfeld—of Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising (Rutgers University Press, 2025), among several peer-reviewed journal articles, op-eds, magazine articles, and exhibition catalogue essays.  

This talk will be chaired by Professor Jana Funke (Professor of Modern Literature and Sexuality Studies, University of Exeter), with Professor David Jones (AHVC) acting as discussant.

Wednesday October 22nd, Digital Humanities Seminar Room 2, 3.30pm-5.30pm. All welcome.

Dr Molly Harrabin (University of Warwick/University of St Andrews) will speak about ‘Bodies That Don’t Matter: Non-Normativity in Weimar Cinema’, chaired by Professor Ulrike Zitzlsperger (LCVS).

Bodies That Don’t Matter: Non-Normativity in Weimar Cinema

 In this presentation, I will present the beginnings of a postdoctoral project that examines how Weimar cinema (1918-1933) medicalized, marginalized, and utilized ‘non-normative’ bodies to uphold normative standards. In the aftermath of the First World War, the body became a highly charged cultural symbol through which anxieties about national identity, trauma, and modernity were negotiated. During this period, visual and philosophical discourse idealized a modern, healthy, and productive body: able-bodied, gender-conforming, youthful, sexually normative, and racially homogeneous (Cowan, 2008; Killen, 2017). Bodies that deviated from this emerging ideal were often pathologized and constructed as decadent, degenerate, or “un-German”, reinforcing exclusionary narratives of national belonging.

Existing scholarship on the healthy body in Weimar culture primarily focus on sport and dance, emphasizing movement, physical discipline, and vitality as responses to the underlying crises of the Weimar Republic (Elswit, 2014; Jensen, 2010; Ruprecht, 2019). Meanwhile, medical humanities and history of medicine projects typically focus on pathology, eugenics, and ill health (Weindling, 1989; Hales, 2024). By tracing the ways in which ‘non-normative’ bodies in Weimar film reinforced dominant ideals of health, productivity, and social cohesion, the project takes a different approach, foregrounding health and productivity as cultural constructs. Structured around four thematic case studies (childbirth, disability and age, gender, race) and drawing an interdisciplinary methodological approach, the research will not only illuminate the complex ways in which Weimar cinema engaged with the complexity of norms and bodily difference in the past but will also engage with and inform debates on health, medical equality, and bodily autonomy that still resonate today.

Bio: Molly Harrabin is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick and a postdoctoral researcher for the German Screen Studies Network at the University of St. Andrews. She recently successfully defended her doctoral thesis, ‘Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Cinema’, which challenges clichés about the representation of gender and sexuality in Weimar cinema, looking beyond the iconic virgin/vamp dichotomy and canonical films and filmmakers to reveal the contradictions and ambivalences that defined the era. Molly founded the Weimar Film Network in 2021, co-organizes the Weimar 100 project, which celebrates the centenaries of Weimar cinema, and recently joined the editorial team of WeimarCinema.org. Molly’s work has been published in Studies in European Cinema and an edited collection in German examining the female film pioneers of the early German film industry. She has forthcoming work examining codified queerness in Pandora’s Box (1929), the life and career of Black actress Madge Jackson in Weimar Germany, and the anti-war messaging of Westfront 1918 (1930). She is also co-editing a volume on the Netflix 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front and co-organising two international conferences dedicated to queer Weimar history and culture and new directions in Weimar Film Studies respectively.

All welcome! The PGR Mini-Symposium is a recurring event, a forum for PhD students to give short presentations based on their dissertation research, with the support of their supervisors and the wider academic community. On Dec 3rd, we welcome TWO speakers: Anna Paola Manna (2nd Yr PhD, supervised by Professor Adam Watt) and Clementine Pursey (2nd Yr PhD, supervised by Professor Tom Hinton). Each will give a 15-20 minute talk based on their research project. Please see their titles and abstracts below. 

• Anna Paola Manna (chaired by Maria Scott), "The Unconscious in Taine’s and Ribot’s Treatises: How the Positivist Body Shaped the Psychoanalytic Mind" 

  The thesis I’m writing examines the influence of the first French psychological treatises on some novels of the fin-de-siècle. In its the first part, I analyse how the conceptual categories shaped by the first psychology scholars intersected with literary ones, creating a common ground that benefited both fields. The present contribution investigates one of these broad and novel categories.

  It aims to analyse the discourse around the unconscious arising from Hippolyte Taine’s De l’intelligence (1870) and Théodule Ribot’s triptych on les maladies (1881–1885). Taine’s and Ribot’s attempt to establish a psychologie positive was significant in accepting the existence of unconscious activities within the nervous system. Their study of bodily reflexes was used to support theories about the structure of the mind, providing scholars and physicians with a promising addition to the language describing the self. They developed a notion of the unconscious which recalls the one emerging from psychoanalysis. While there is a tendency to divide the world of cognitive sciences into before and after Freud, examining the first French psychological treatises reveals surprising nuances within this perspective. This work helps contextualize the roots of a concept that was highly influential in the literary imaginary, while suggesting a narrowing of the perceived gap between positive science and psychoanalysis.

• Clementine Pursey (chaired by Tom Hinton), "Teaching Medieval Maidens Manners with Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz
• "Walter de Bibbesworth’s thirteenth-century Anglo-French language treatise the Tretiz is an invaluable source for high medieval pedagogical traditions. However, previous scholarship has mostly focused on the text’s linguistic value, overlooking the implications of the “micronarratives” that make up the wider text. Written for a mother and her children and later circulating among clergy, scholars and the laity, the Tretiz is distinguished from similar texts addressing an exclusively male audience. Within the creative and humorous rhymed verses are stock female characters whose behaviour Bibbesworth eagerly criticises. Naïve young girls should “eschuez flatour ki seet flater” lest their financial and physical assets fall into peril. Overly flirtatious women are “fole” and will contract venereal diseases. Girls who please their lovers by lisping their words are improper. These moral teachings are a reminder of expected female behaviour and the importance of perpetuating courtesy across generations. The rewards of adhering to these conventions, as well as the consequences of deviation, insert patriarchal hegemony into the traditional oral transmission of the mother-child dyad. The presence of these behavioural models in a text with the primary purpose of language acquisition suggests a new reading of the Tretiz as an early Insular courtesy text for women.  

Zeba Talkhani Q &A, Feb 18th with Prof. Helen Vassallo

Zeba Talkani is a production editor at Bloomsbury Academic and the author of My Past Is A Foreign Country: A Muslim Feminist Finds Herself.

Digital Humanities Seminar Room 1

Professor Luciano Parisi and Professor Muireann Maguire co-direct the Centre for Translating Cultures.

For all enquiries regarding centre activies in the 2024-25 academic year, please email Luciano.

For all enquiries regarding centre activies in the 2025-26 academic year, please email Muireann.

Research seminar

Wednesday, February 26, Room C417, Amory Building, 15:30-17:00

Main speaker: Dr Carlotta Moro (University of Exeter) and Dr Catherine Evans (University of Exeter)

Title: Pregnant with Thought: Women Writing Philosophy in Early Modern England and Italy

How did early modern women, often excluded from formal learning, engage with, write, and shape philosophical thought in Europe? The Cultures of Philosophy project seeks to address this by looking beyond ‘legitimate’ forms of philosophy, such as the treatise, dialogue and essay, to include marginalia, miscellany, paratext, dedications, historical fiction, hagiography, and incidental ‘salon’ verse. 

Two of the project’s research fellows will present their initial findings on the English and Italian contexts, specifically examining how women’s writings on pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing engage with philosophical debates. Despite the prevalence of the Socratic midwife metaphor, the philosophical significance of motherhood has often been ignored, with subjective accounts from mothers seen as “unworthy of serious attention” (Lintott and Stander-Staudt, 2013). Plato’s Symposium argues that there are pregnancies of the soul and pregnancies of the body, and that those of the soul are inarguably more valuable as they lead to “wisdom and virtue”, which are “fairer and more immortal” than a child. However early modern women’s accounts of motherhood demonstrate they were successful multitaskers: capable of discussing the metaphysical, moral, and medical issues surrounding the begetting, birth, and rearing of a child whilst being engaged in all these activities.

Catherine Evans will examine the English context, discussing how Mary Rich and Mary Carey explore miscarriage and the death of their young children in their devotional works. Rich and Carey depict maternal suffering as a site of religious conversion, both chastising and consoling themselves for these losses. Carlotta Moro will focus on Camilla Bonfiglio’s overlooked Libro in lode delle donne e sulla crudeltà degli uomini (Book in Praise of Women and On the Cruelty of Men, ca. 1619-1620), which draws on a variety of literary forms – from the treatise, to the sonnet, to the poem in terza rima – to critique patriarchal rule as a tyrannical abuse of power arising from cruelty, and, conversely, to extol women’s capacity for love and generosity, most profoundly expressed through the experience of motherhood.

This work is supported by the European Research Council-selected Starting Grant, ‘Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee.

Research seminar

Thursday 6th February, Queen's LT4.1, 15:30-17:00

Main speaker: Dr. Tom Stennett (University of Exeter)

Discussant: Dr Alexandra Reza (University of Bristol)

Title: Writers in armed struggle in Angola and Mozambique

In 1959, Frantz Fanon theorized combat literature as works that incited an entire people to fight for national liberation. The armed Mozambican Marxist nationalist front, FRELIMO, appropriated Fanon’s discussion of combat literature in its proposal of poesia de combate (combat poetry), which its Angolan sister organization, the MPLA, would in turn appropriate. This presentation analyses the aesthetics of armed struggle that appears in the combat poetry published by FRELIMO during and after the armed liberation struggles against Portuguese colonialism. I read Mozambican combat poems and theorizations of combat poetry authored by Marxist FRELIMO intellectuals alongside the analyses of revolutionary armed struggle developed by FRELIMO’s first president Eduardo Mondlane and Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral.  Furthermore, I situate the proposal of combat poetry as a vehicle for revolutionary ideology within the context of debates over the functions of ideology in the African Revolution. In this way, following Alexandra Reza’s (2024) approach to analysing négritude poetry, I read combat poems as sources of political theory that can help us to understand ideological debates amongst FRELIMO intellectuals relating to questions of political violence, political economy, class, and revolutionary commitment.

Research seminar

Wednesday, January 22nd, LT6 Laver Building, 15:30-17:00

Main speaker: Prof Monica Good (University of British Columbia, Okanagan)

Chair: Dr Katie Brown (Modern Languages and Cultures)

Title: Maintaining and strengthening Maya cosmovision and cosmoperception

In this presentation, I will explore the significance of Maya cosmovision and cosmoperception—the ways in which Yucatec Maya people understand and situate themselves in the world. As an Indigenous scholar from Mexico working closely with Maya communities, I will discuss how Maya knowledge systems, rooted in a deep connection to the land, language, and community, shape our worldview and inform our identity. I will also reflect on the importance of Maya people expressing how we think and speak, emphasizing the role of language and cultural practices in maintaining and strengthening our identity in today’s Western-driven society. This talk will highlight why it is vital for Maya communities to continue asserting their ways of knowing and being, both as an act of cultural resilience and as a necessary response to the challenges posed by globalization and cultural assimilation.