World-making remembrances in queer audiovisual culture
International symposium gathering film scholars, filmmakers, and archivists in order to explore issues of queer audiovisual memory.
Taking queer scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) contention that “[o]ur remembrances and their ritualized tellings – through film, video, performance, writing, and visual culture – [have] world-making potentialities” as a cue, this symposium inquiries into the current surge of interest in audiovisual explorations and mobilizations of the queer past.
In addition to an ever-expanding corpus of film and television programs that are turning the camera towards LGBTQAI+ histories, countless artistic and archival projects around the globe are also contributing to the rich ongoing creation and circulation of queer cultural memory. In addressing a diverse range of materials that seek to reimagine and represent queer and trans histories – following ephemeral traces, ghostly presences, anxious citations, and ritualized embodied practices that merge the private with the collective – this symposium aims to precipitate productive and critical conversations that foreground the affective and political meanings of queer media memories and popular history-making.
The symposium is organized by the Department of Cultural Sciences to form part of the research project “Queer world-making in the welfare state: a reception study of the role of audiovisual media in queer counter publics in Sweden, 1944-1989” (The Swedish Research Council, 2022-2024).
The inauguration will take place on Tuesday December 5 at 15:15 in Room J222, as speakers and audience are greeted by Assistant Dean at the Faculty of Humanities Andrea Castro, Lena Martinsson, Head of the Department of Cultural Scienes, and Ingrid Ryberg, head of the symposium. The symposium will be held in Rooms J222 and J330, respectively, at the Faculty of Humanities.
The symposium entails a collaboration between the Department of Cultural Sciences and Hagabion, who will host a screening along with a discussion of the "newly discovered queer film classic" Avskedet (The Farewell) (directed by Tuija-Maija Niskanen, produced by Ingmar Bergman - 1982) on December 5, 2023, at 20:00 (with English subtitles), and KvinnSam, National Resource Library for Gender Studies and university-wide research infrastructure at the University of Gothenburg. The latter will host an exhibition showcasing material relating to the symposium as of November 30, 2023.
Symposium schedule and list of speakers
Detailed presentations of participants at the symposium
December 5 15:15-17:00 and 20:00-22:00
J222 and Hagabion
15:15-15:45
Welcome
Andrea Castro, Assistant Dean for Research at the Faculty of Humanities
Lena Martinsson, Head of Department of Cultural Sciences
Introduction
Ingrid Ryberg (University of Gothenburg)
15:45-17:30
Chair: Anna Backman Rogers (University of Gothenburg)
Anu Koivunen (University of Turku)
Beyond paranoia and reparation: Tracing queer worlds in Finnish TV history
Clara Bradbury-Rance (King’s College London)
The Anxious Citations of Lesbian Film Studies
20:00-22:00 Hagabion, Linnégatan 21
Screening: Avskedet (The Farewell, Tuija-Maija Niskanen, 1982) (English subtitles)
Conversation between Ingrid Ryberg and Marie Falksten (artist and filmmaker)
Tickets: hagabion.se
December 6 9:15-12:15 and 13:15-15:30
NB: before lunch J222, after lunch J330
9:15-10:00
Chair: Karolina Westling (University of Gothenburg)
Ingrid Ryberg (University of Gothenburg)
Queerly remembered on VHS: the slow death of City Club’s drag show videotape
10:15-12:00
Chair: Erika Alm (University of Gothenburg)
Eliza Steinbock (Maastricht University)
Ghosts in My Throat: Mediumship and the Grain of the Trans Voice in the Historical Documentaries of Chase Joynt (No Ordinary Man & Framing Agnes)
Ester M. Bergsmark (Stockholm University of the Arts)
voice under and traumaturgy
13:15-14:00
Chair: Valeria Villegas Lindvall (University of Gothenburg)
Roundtable
Anna Linder, Artistic Director of SAQMI, Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images
Rachel Pierce, Research Coordinator, KvinnSam, Humanities Libraries, University of Gothenburg
14:00-14:45
Chair: Karolina Westling (University of Gothenburg)
Kata Kyrölä (University College London)
“Show Yourself” – queer Indigenous and Sámi sensibilities in contemporary cinema
14:45-15:30
Wrap up