The Desire to See and Be Seen

Chapter 1 interrogates Bruce LaBruce’s, Todd Haynes’s, and John Greyson’s respective approaches to community and belonging in the midst of the pandemic. By turning to the biopic genre, these filmmakers sought to challenge how dominant culture sees and represents pathologized bodies. Queer filmmakers’ use of the biopic draws on the genre’s history of creating an imagined community, national and otherwise, to represent alternative social relations constructed in the image of different (queer) individuals. Moreover, the chapter gives sustained consideration to films like Zero Patience (Greyson, 1993) to explore constructions of queer (or gay and lesbian) community—who they include, who they exclude, what they produce, and how they affect queer embodiment.

Constructing Chinese Lesbian Online Community through Social Media: an Actor-Network Theory-Based Discussion

Nowadays, social media plays an essential role in people’s life. Compared with heterosexual individuals, social media is more important for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals due to its advantages of anonymity and convenience. Among LGBT individuals, Chinese Lesbians are under greater social pressure due to the influence of traditional Chinese socio-cultural value systems. Building online lesbian communities through social media is one of solutions for helping Chinese lesbians to reduce their stress and protect their rights. However, lesbian social apps have developed notably slowly in a global context. There have been few studies on lesbian apps in the past. The value and utility of lesbian social apps in building an online lesbian community have not been fully explored. This article used "the L-app" (a Chinese lesbian application) as an example and utilized Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to study the values and challenges of the lesbian social app in the establishment of an online community. According to the four foundational stages (problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization) of network construction in ANT, this study discussed the feasibility, values, and challenges of lesbian social apps in building an online lesbian community. Furthermore, this article proposed corresponding potential solutions to these challenges based on ANT. This paper provided support for Chinese Lesbian community constructions in the future.

"Carmilla" fandom as a lesbian community of feeling

The fandom of the contemporary lesbian web series, Carmilla (2014–16), is an affective community built on a set of inclusions and exclusions. Carmilla, a 121-episode web series shot in vlog format, follows the relationship between a human girl and a female vampire, and it has an active online lesbian fandom. Affective bonds are created between Carmilla fans through various kinds of online fan practices, and these flows of affect are influenced by the race and location of fans.

The Polish Paradox: From a Fight for Democracy to the Political Radicalization and Social Exclusion

Poland has gone through a series of remarkable political transformations over the last 30 years. It has changed from a communist state in the Soviet sphere of influence to an autonomic prosperous democracy and proud member of the EU. Paradoxically, since 2015, Poland seems to be heading rapidly in the opposite direction. It was the Polish Solidarity movement that started the peaceful revolution that subsequently triggered important democratic changes on a worldwide scale, including the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism and the end of Cold War. Fighting for freedom and independence is an important part of Polish national identity, sealed with the blood of generations dying in numerous uprisings. However, participation in the democratic process is curiously limited in Poland. The right-wing, populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) won elections in Poland in 2015. Since then, Poles have given up more and more freedoms in exchange for promises of protection from different imaginary enemies, including Muslim refugees and the gay and lesbian community. More and more social groups are being marginalized and deprived of their civil rights. The COVID-19 pandemic has given the ruling party a reason to further limit the right of assembly and protest. Polish society is sinking into deeper and deeper divisions.

"Iz ormara na police": O odrastanju i izlasku iz ormara u hrvatskoj queer književnosti

“OUT OF THE CLOSET, ONTO THE BOOKSHELF”: ON GROWING UP AND COMING OUT IN CROATIAN QUEER LITERATURE In the contemporary Croatian queer prose, growing up is represented as a process with uncertain outcomes. Contemporary writers do not describe gay and lesbian identities as already shaped, finalized, and unquestionably different from heterosexuality. Their poetics have many predecessors, Bildungsroman, the 19th-century genre that, despite conventional epilogues, depicts youth as a period of the adventure and overturn, being the oldest one. The second important influence are foreign coming out novels (texts that describe the articulation of gay and lesbian identities in the family and community) or narratives of affirmation, and the third Yugoslav young adult prose. The publication of the Croatian queer prose has increased dramatically since the first Gay Pride in Zagreb (2002) and the Queer Zagreb festival the following year. In the short story collection Poqureene priče [The queered stories] (2004) growing up is one of the prevailing topics with eventually popularized motifs such as coming out, moving away / traveling, cultural signifiers of gay identity, and crossings of sexual orientation with gender and class. Writing in the first person is also very popular. Vladimir Stojsavljević’s oeuvre is important because the author depicts growing up in three contexts, during Yugoslavia, in the war-time, and in post-transition, and texts by Nora Verde are a novelty because she writes about queer women as belonging to lesbian community. Young authors Mirta Maslać and Viktorija Božina reveal an interesting autobiographical discourse and share a tendency towards using diverse cultural references. This paper aims to show how the encounter of local gay and lesbian culture, foreign fiction, and already present genres has shaped the current texts about queer identity that manage to avoid writing about sexuality within simplistic, binary oppositions.