Workshop: The Desire to be Radical – A Queer Writing Workshop

Part of The Coast is Queer 2023.

This workshop will work at the interface of creative writing, politics, and “queer theory”. The workshop will offer for discussion some key provocations from queer theory texts related to the “radical” nature of queerness. We will then move into writing exercises that respond to or challenge some of the claims in these texts. While the workshop involves writing, participants do not need to think of themselves as creative writers or as academics – we’re inviting a range of forms of writing (letters, memos, lists, poems, rants) and anyone is welcome to participate regardless of prior creative or academic experience.

Jackie Stacey is Professor at the University of Manchester where she is currently co-director of the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture with Ben Nichols. Her publications include: Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (1994); Queer Screen: A Screen Reader (co-edited with Sarah Street, 2006), The Cinematic Life of the Gene (2010); and Writing Otherwise: Experiments in Cultural Criticism (co-edited with Janet Wolff, 2013). Her most recent articles have been published in Camera Obscura, differences, Screen and Subjectivity.  She is now working on a research project on Tilda Swinton.

Samuel Solomon lives in Brighton where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Sussex and co-directs the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. He is the author of Special Subcommittee (Commune Editions, 2017) and Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism: Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2019), and he is co-translator from the Yiddish of The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (Tebot Bach, 2014).  He is currently at work on a literary labour history of queer typesetting.

Sponsored by the “Beyond Radical” Network.

Beyond Radical is an AHRC-funded research network for UK-based scholars, artists and activists interested in the continued interrogation and development of queer theory.

Please note: Workshop tickets are not included in day or weekend passes and need to be purchased individually.