Boyi Huang - The Self-Mediation of LGBT⁺ Identities in the PRC (SALIS)

My PhD research aims to examine the online fandom communities who are voluntarily subtitling (fansubbing) LGBT⁺ media content from the perspective of self-mediation – seeing the fansubbing community as contributing to the circulation of media content of their own choices. The strictly controlled society and mediascape of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been a particularly hostile environment for the LGBT⁺ community to negotiate their intersubjectivity and visibility. Despite some advances that have been achieved through the LGBT⁺ movement in the PRC, Chinese LGBT⁺ citizens still enjoy no legal protection from discrimination. More importantly, for the purposes of this study, sexual minorities are hardly visible in the public sphere in terms of the representation of queer identities in mainstream media. Facing such hostility, fansubbing communities, however, are voluntarily translating and distributing foreign LGBT⁺ audiovisual content (e.g., films, TV series) online to numerous people in the PRC. This clearly shows a tension between the state-controlled media content and the media content that members of the Chinese society demand, specifically LGBT⁺ content (Li and Zhang 2017). This research will investigate the dynamics of an Chinese fansubbing community online through a netnographic approach – engaging in computer-mediated interaction with the geographically distant community members. The research findings will eventually contribute to knowledge about the role of translation in the self-mediation of LGBT⁺ identities in the PRC and shed light on the queer dimension of online fansubbing communities. Moreover, by drawing on concepts like self-mediation, the resulting framework will build a powerful tool for exploring the intersection between audiovisual translation and queer studies, a highly interdisciplinary domain that up to now has seen little research, particularly when it comes to fandom culture and digital media.

Robbie Lawlor - Procuring Health Equity: How HIV Treatment

Activists are Fighting for Their Right to Medicines in Ukraine (SALIS)
Ukraine has the second-highest rate of new HIV diagnoses and AIDS-related deaths in Eastern Europe. People living with HIV who are on effective treatment and take their medication everyday live long and healthy lives and cannot pass the virus on to anyone else. Although there are many different HIV medications available globally, in 2015, only 48% of all people diagnosed with HIV in Ukraine had limited access to this life-saving treatment. One reason many people did not have access to treatment is that international trade laws exist that allow drug companies to charge whatever they like for the medications they make. The Ukrainian health system could not afford to buy HIV medication as drug companies have set prices too high. However, by 2018, the number of people living with HIV who had access to treatment increased to 72%. HIV/AIDS civil society, that is, HIV organisations and patient advocates, in Ukraine, are successfully advocating and campaigning for the price reduction of key HIV drugs by using flexibilities found in international trade laws, making them available at affordable prices. Additionally, HIV/AIDS civil society influenced politicians to change the way the Ukrainian government buys medicines, saving the country millions of hryvnia in savings. This research uses political process theory to gain an understanding of the geopolitical conditions that simultaneously favour and restrict HIV treatment activism in Ukraine; the history and evolution of HIV civil society organisations and civic protests in Ukraine; and the role of multilateral institutions, the pharmaceutical industry and State on treatment activism. This research will add to the limited existing body of knowledge in the field of HIV and access to medicines activism in Eastern Europe.

Maria Clara Menezes -“To be the serpent under’t”: Con-Artists and Contemporary Dissimulation as Female Empowerment in the 21st Century   (SALIS)
It is noticeable how women are almost universally associated with simulation and deceit. As ethical principles, dissimulation and simulation have an enduring presence in philosophical debate and, while the first has been considered a prerogative of rational minds and associated with the activities of men—especially those occupying powerful positions—,the latter has been taken as inherently feminine. Therefore, instead of moral dissimulation, women would tend to perform amoral simulation, presenting a fictitious version of themselves, and thus incurring in imposture.
These concepts have long influenced artistic imagery. Literature and the arts abound in depictions of women as “innocent flowers hiding serpents under them” (Macbeth, 1.5.64-65), in which fraud takes place in diverse scenarios. From its initial domesticity, however, feminine deceit started to occupy public spaces and to change its values as its practitioners gained more freedom in society. This raises questions concerning imposture’s interplay with both feminism and with the spaces where these impostors act.

Therefore, my work tries to explore the changes undergone by the types of female imposture and delineate how depictions of moral dissimulation and amoral simulation and imposture have appropriated from feminist discourses in the 21st century.

David O'Mullane -The Art of Cruising: Public Sex Cultures, LGBT Politics and XXIst Century Art (SALIS)

Cruising refers to the subcultural practices employed by gay men to identify one another in public space. Traditionally this involved using clandestine visual or verbal codes to signal one’s sexuality to other discerning individuals. In the early 1900s, for example, wearing a red tie was a discreet way to announce one’s homosexuality to others in the know. Similarly, in the 1960s, the handkerchief code secretly signalled one’s sexuality and sexual preferences in a public setting. From a contemporary standpoint, the popularity of apps like Grindr demonstrate how cruising lives on today as it gives queer people a private method of identifying their sexual peers in public space. Academic explorations of cruising in art have contextualised these subcultural practices in terms of sociohistorical factors: homophobia, oppression and urban alienation. However, all these studies focused on art produced within the period of late modernity (1900-1989). This research builds on previous explorations by adopting a more contemporary focus, examining artworks and exhibitions relating to cruising culture from the year 2000 onwards.

As cruising often involves ephemeral and secretive contact with strangers, the practice now sits in tension with visibility politics – which supports the notion that being gay is synonymous with proudly embracing a public, often desexualised, identity – and health promotion perspectives on sexual risk and disease. Therefore, unlike previous research which focused on homophobic oppression, this PhD turns the focus inwards, exploring how public sex is connected to contemporary queer life and politics. It looks to how artists approach the cruising cultures of the past and present, asking if these subcultural practices are mythologized, politicized, or pathologized within the works. 

Angelos Bollas - HIV/AIDS Narratives of Suffering: Cultural Representations at the Dawn of the 2020s (SALIS)

This study analyses contemporary cultural representations of HIV/AIDS suffering in the English-speaking global North (UK, Ireland, and North America) from screen (TV series and reality TV shows) to activist campaigns (PrEP, U=U). In doing so, it aims to provide an understanding of if and how the queering of cultural discourses around HIV/AIDS is achieved and what its effects are. In the last couple of years, there has been a change in the way HIV/AIDS is being portrayed in popular culture (e.g. Queer Eye, Pose). Rather than offering a nostalgic – and arguably stigmatising – history of the virus, I argue that we have started being presented with mainstream products which change/queer the way in which HIV/AIDS suffering is being represented. We are soon approaching the end of the fourth decade with HIV/AIDS. During the crisis years, i.e. 1981 – 1996, popular culture treated HIV/AIDS with terror, shame, discrimination, and stigma (Caron, 2001). In 1996, antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) were introduced and rendered life with HIV possible. Since then and until the beginning of the 2010s, the engagement of mainstream culture with HIV/AIDS was significantly minimised (Race, 2001). This silent period came to an end in the 2010s when a renewed interest in HIV/AIDS emerged in popular media and culture (Kagan, 2018). Since the outbreak of the epidemic, numerous academic studies analyse cultural representations of HIV/AIDS arguing that these representations are dictated by heteronormative and homonormative hegemonies aiming at pathologizing non-heterosexual identities (Becker, 2006). My claim is that since 2018 we have been presented with new, queer narratives of HIV/AIDS suffering which reverse the stigmatising discourses that have been associated with the people who live with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). This investigation provides a queer reading of cultural productions focusing on the ways in which HIV/AIDS suffering is being queered, in an attempt to de-stigmatise PLWHA.

David Carroll - Songs To Save Your Life: The Queer Messaging of 1980s Pop Music (SALIS)
In queer histories of the West, the 1980’s is commonly recalled as a dark time for queer communities. A combination of socially conservative legislation, the continued criminalisation of homosexuality and the advent of HIV/AIDS all contributed further to the existing marginalisation of this group.

This oppressive context extended to the music industry where many queer artists/performers were often not ‘out’, due to the social environment of the time, and the conservative nature of the music business.

However, the lyrical themes and the iconography employed by many pop stars of the time unearths a wealth of queer/gay references which, despite the censorship of the time, still spoke to many. These often coded messages offered the only mirroring, or representation of the lives certain parts of the audience lead.

From whole albums packed with love songs where not a single pronoun is used to indicate the singer/lyricists orientation preferences, iconography borrowed from gay culture and used in music videos of the time, to single and album art-work with a queer bent, this research will explore and illustrate just how vibrant queer themes shone through the work of many artists of the time. 

Annette Skade - "Watch This Spillage": Allusion and Intertext in the Poetry of Anne Carson (School of English)

Allusion and intertext are integral to Anne Carson’s poetry and manifest the erotics of “coming to know”. As such, they demand a level of critical attention that has conventionally been afforded more usually to the narrative aspects of her work. Carson's imagination necessarily works in dialogue with her theoretical and scholarly compulsions to create a unique dynamic, an ever-building connective framework of “triangulation-as-process”. Triangulation in cartography provides a paradigm to illustrate this dynamic. Triangulation-as-process provides an orthographic reading of the cultural space Carson opens for readers. Writers from disparate times and genres usually form the nexus of every particular allusive triangulation. I frame the instances of quotation and citation within the poetry as speech act, referencing the interest in theories regarding speech and writing evident in Carson’s work. I identify post-structural influences in the relational dynamics within the process of triangulation, and suggest that her abiding concerns regarding gender, hybridity, fluidity, movement and spatiality are fostered by this process. The mesh of allusions that Carson weaves within and between texts may activate further intertextual connections in the reader’s mind, moving beyond the promptings of authorial intent. Allusion and intertext facilitate the complicated cross-talk of contemporary and traditional narratives, evoking both a sense of flux and of history within her work. The homoerotic triangulations of “Sappho 31” and the Phaedrus are central to this process, allowing power lines to shift, and enacting Carson’s disruption of the narrative of normative heterosexuality. The dynamics of allusion and intertext require a significant shift in readers’ perspectives, and my readings of Carson seek to exemplify that necessary mobility.

Antonsa, Silvia and Marino, Elisabetta (2021) 'Transnational Subjects and the Global South: Introductory Remarks' in De Genere. Rivista di studi letterari, postcoloniali e di genere, 7, pp. 1-9.

Antonsa, Silvia and Demata, Massimiliano (2021) 'Get Covid Done: Discourses on the National Health Service (NHS) during Brexit and the Coronavirus Pandemic' Textus. English Studies in Italy, 34, 2, pp. 47-65.

Antonsa, Silva (2019) Domesticising the Exotic. Isabel Burton’s Inner Life of Syria, Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, 1, 1, Spring 2019, ISSN: 2632-4253, pp. 57-79.

Antonsa, Silva (2019) 'Relazioni affettive, trauma e narrazione in A Home at the End of the World di Michael Cunningham' Ácoma - Rivista Internazionale di Studi Nord-Americani, 16, Primavera-Estate 2019, ISSN: 2421-423X, pp. 79-92.

Avgeri, M.  (April 2021) ‘Trans*it: Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Asylum Claimants’ Narratives in Greece.’, Sexualities,  https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607211013278.

Avgeri, M.  (May 2021)  ‘Assessing transgender and gender nonconforming asylum claims: Towards a Transgender Studies Framework on Particular Social Group and Persecution.’ Frontiers in Human Dynamics'
 https://10.3389/fhumd.2021.653583

Bollas, A. (2022) 'Normal People (2020) and the new post-Celtic Irish man', Journal of Popular Film and Television, 50(2), pp. 50-59. https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2022.2033156

Bollas, A. (2021) 'Homoterrorism: Definition, application, subversion', Fast Capitalism, 18(1), pp. 26-34

Bollas, A. (2021) 'A critical discussion of inclusive approaches to sexualities in ELT', ELT Journal. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccaa075

Bollas, A. (2021) 'Masculinities on the Side: An Exploration of the Function of Homosexism in Maintaining Hegemonic Masculinities and Sexualities', Sexuality & Culture. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-021-09848-3 

Bollas, A. (2020) 'Literature as Activism - From Entertainment to Challenging Social Norms: Michael Nava's Goldenboy (1988)', International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature. 9(1). pp. 50-55. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.9n.1p.50

Callan, A., Corbally, M. and McElvaney, R. (2021) ‘A Scoping Review of Intimate Partner Violence as It Relates to the Experiences of Gay and Bisexual Men’, Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 22(2), pp. 233–248. doi: 10.1177/1524838020970898. 

Castillo Villanueva, Alicia (2019) 'Por tu bien y Néixer, reflexiones audiovisuales sobre la violencia obstétrica'. Bulletin of Spanish Studies 

Castillo Villanueva, Alicia and Lucía Pintado (2019) 'Transcultural Memory and Translation in La voz dormida (2002)'. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2019.1690010

DiTecco, D., Karaian, L. (2022) “New Technology, Same Old Stigma: Media Narratives of Sex Robots and Sex Work,” Sexuality & Culture (On-line pre-pub). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-022-10027-1

Field, D.J., de Wit, J., Davoren, M.P., O'Reilly, E.J. and Den Daas, C. (2023) Chemsex, Anxiety and Depression Among Gay, Bisexual and Other Men Who have Sex with Men Living with HIV. AIDS and Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-023-04041-z

García, P. (2020) “A Geocritical Perspective on the Female Fantastic: Rethinking the Domestic”, CLCWEB: Comparative Literature and Culture, Vol. 22.4 

García, P. (2019) “Spanish and Latin American women writers in the Literary Canon: a Paratextual Study of Anthologies of Fantastic Literature (1946-2016)”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. 96.6 

Roas, D.; García, P. (eds.). (2020) Special Issue: New Perspectives on the Female Fantastic: Theories and Methodologies, CLCWEB: Comparative Literature and Culture, Vol. 22.4

García, P. (ed.). (2019) Special Issue: Gender and the Hispanic Fantastic. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. 96.6, 2019

Ging, Debbie (2020) 'Pro-anorexia and Thinspiration' in The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc

Karaian, L (2022) “Plastic Fantastic: Sex Robots and/as Sexual Fantasy,” Sexualities, online first, June 2022, 1-20. Open Access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13634607221106667

Karaian, L and Brady, D. (2020) “Revisiting the “Private Use Exception” to Canada’s Child Pornography Laws: Teenage Sexting, Sex Positivity, Pleasure, and Control in the Digital Age,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 56(2): 301-350.  https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol56/iss2/3/

Karaian, L. (2019) “Relative Lust: Accidental Incest’s Affective and Legal Resonances” Law, Culture and the Humanities 15(3): 806–825. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1743872116661271)

Kitching, K., Kiely, E., Ging, D and Keane, M. (2020) Parents' encounters with 'the sexualisation of childhood': Paying attention differently? Gender and Education. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2020.1786011

Ging, Debbie, Theodore Lynn, and Pierangelo Rosati (2019) "Neologising misogyny: Urban Dictionary’s folksonomies of sexual abuse." New Media & Society: 1461444819870306.

Ging, Debbie and Neary, Aoife (Eds). (2019) Special Issue on Gender, Sexuality and Bullying in International Journal of Bullying Prevention 

Theo Lynn, Patricia Takako Endo, Pierangelo Rosati, Ivanovitch Silva, Guto Leoni and Debbie Ging (June 3-4, 2019), ‘Detecting Hate Speech Online: A Comparison of Machine Learning Approaches for Automatic Misogyny Detection in Urban Dictionary’, IEEE Cyber Science 2019 Conference, University of Oxford, UK. 

Ging, Debbie (2019) 'Gender, Sexuality, and Irish Film' In: A Companion to British and Irish Cinema. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Healion, K., O’Driscoll, A., O’Meara, J. and Stone, K. (2020). ‘Activism through Celebration: The role of the Dublin Feminist Film Festival in supporting women in Irish film, 2014–17’ in S. Liddy (ed.), Women in Irish Film: Stories and Storytellers, pp. 153-168. Cork University Press.

Martínez, J.M.S.-M. and Kallitsis, P. (2022) ‘(Homo-) Sexuelle Lust jenseits der Metropole: Das intime Queeren von Räumen in Aachen’, sub$\backslash$urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung, 10(2/3), pp. 219–236.

Mehdaoui, D. (2021) ‘Women’s Politics of Resistance in Making the Invisible Visible’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 10(6), pp. 59–67. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.10n.6p.59

O’Driscoll, Aileen (2019). Searching for Understanding in Alan Gilsenan’s ‘The Meeting’. Estudios Irlandeses, Issue 14: 324-327. https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2019-9023

O’Driscoll, Aileen (2019). From sex objects to bumbling idiots: tracing advertising students’ perceptions of gender and advertising. Feminist Media Studies. 19 (5): 732-749 doi: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1506943

Ramaswamy, H.H.S. and Kumar, S., 2021. A critical analysis of unsustainable higher education internationalisation policies in developing economies. Policy Futures in Education, pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.1177/1478210321999186

Ramaswamy, H.H.S., 2021. Will comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) help in youth development?. Health Education, 121(2), pp. 140-149

Armano Emiliana, Rivetti Paola, Busso Sandro (2020) La fabbrica della conoscenza e delle precarietà. Riflessioni da un’autoinchiesta nell’università al tempo della crisi, in Emiliana Armano (ed.), Pratiche di inchiesta e conricerca oggi, Ombre corte, pp. 74-87. 

Rivetti Paola (2020) ‘The Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defence in Tehran,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 349-355 (Q1).

Rivetti Paola (2020) ‘What happens in-between mobilizations? Building and organizing contentious politics at the University of Tehran (2007-2017),’ Partecipazione e conflitto, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 587-606 (Q2).

Biagini Erika, Rivetti Paola (2020) ‘State repression and activist organizing in informal spaces: Comparing feminist movements in Egypt and Iran,’ APSA-MENA Politics Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 31-36.

Rivetti Paola (2019) ‘race, identity, and the state after the Irish abortion referendum,’ Feminist Review, Vol. 122, No. 1, pp. 181-188 (Q1).

Camozzi Ilenya, Cherubini Daniela, Rivetti Paola (2019) ‘The Transnational Engagement of Second Generations: Young People of Egyptian Background in Italy and the Arab Uprisings,’ Polis, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 373-392 (Q3)

Sánchez-Molero M., José Miguel (2021): Queer(ing Digital) Citymaking. Resilience Through Local and Virtual Queer Spatial Production in Times of Crisis. In: Bangratz, M.; Förster, A. (Ed.) (2021): Digital Citymakers – Co-creating the City in Times of Digital Transformation. pnd rethinking planning 2/2021. RWTH Aachen. 71-86. www.planung-neu-denken.de/2-2021-digital-citymakers/queering-digital-citymaking