Excursions is a peer-reviewed online and print journal, based at the University of Sussex and designed to showcase high quality, innovative postgraduate research that emphasizes and promotes the permeable nature of academic disciplines. The journal is published annually, each year with a different theme that attracts contributions from various academic fields, both at Sussex and beyond. The journal has been run by doctoral students for 10 years, and within that time it has developed a range of interdisciplinary collaborations with academics and practitioners from various universities and institutions.
A Black Queer Phenomenology of Space in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
In Giovanni’s Room (1956), James Baldwin emphasises the Black queer space of architecture, particularly of lines, walls, and wallpaper. In particular, by using walls to highlight the existence of the poché, or in-between architectural pocket space, Baldwin generates an inside/outside space that facilitates a slippage and reclamation of subjectivity for his queer characters. Throughout this novel, the characters seek shelter and are described as houses and walls themselves even as they are un-housed in spaces which, from an apartment building to the human body, are always permeable and temporary. Each wall of Baldwin’s novel is, like Black space and queer space, a site of tension and entanglement. These walls are complicated by Giovanni’s violent efforts to expand the architectural and symbolic space of his room. He takes a hammer to the walls not to escape into another apartment on the other side of the walls but, rather, to open the poché between walls. The poché is a liminal and undefined inside/outside space (even on architectural blueprints, when/if it appears). Baldwin’s use of the poché in this novel disrupts white and (hetero)normative expectations of space and classification, makes visible hidden histories, resists stability, and promotes inclusive assemblages.
Copyright (c) 2023 Lucien Darjeun Meadows https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Queering the Schizophrenic Body: Re-orientated nerves
In this paper I explore how some insights about queer embodiment can be applied to the subtleties of psychotic experience, introducing a recovery-oriented dialogue between a queer-phenomenological and phenomenological-psychiatric approach. More specifically, I show how some concepts from Sara Ahmed can complement the ipseity-disturbance model, with which Louis Sass and his colleagues have re-introduced phenomenological psychiatry to mainstream schizophrenia research.
Copyright (c) 2023 Phyla Kupferschmidt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Brit Schulte posits that the sex working person is confronted by ever-increasing demand as well as proportionately increasing criminalization and persecution. They also see the sex working person as representative of queer and trans*-- truly, of outsider subjectivity. The tension produced by these coextensive increases creates the conditions that compel an outsider (sex worker) to fight for an end to stigma and marginalization. This necessary struggle that they outline takes place in broader movement spaces, grassroots collectives, smaller mutual aid networks, and between fellow workers. Their essay highlights experiences within the above categories of queer and trans* sex worker-led community organizing, specifically drawing upon full-service sex worker-run mutual aid networks, harm reduction formations, tech-centred activism, and fetish provider-led collectives. Through personal and broader movement analysis, Schulte links sex workers' political fights to the broader struggle for labour justice under capitalism, locating sex worker organizing in our contemporary moment in a rich tradition of hustle and survival.
Copyright (c) 2023 Brit Erin Schulte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Multilingualism in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater and Zahra Patterson’s Chronology
Multilingualism is one of marginalised authors’ strategies to express their stories and identities when writing in what bell hooks labelled ‘the oppressor’s language’. It allows them to navigate language imbued with contradictions: the language that connects and provides terminology for some marginalised identities while being infused with various oppressive regimes. This article discusses the forms and roles of multilingualism in two queer life-writing texts: written in English and interwoven with African influences, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018c) is an autobiographical novel; Zahra Patterson’s Chronology (2018) is an experimental autobiographical essay. The scope and the forms of multilingualism differ: in Chronology, a significant part of the text is written in Sesotho; in Freshwater, the passages in Igbo are comparably scarce. Emezi, however, also adopts a non-Western register in the English passages as another strategy of postcolonial writing ‘in character’. The article argues that while the concrete strategies vary, the authors employ multilingualism for similar political and aesthetic purposes: they utilise it to challenge the presumed universality of the Western conceptualisations of identity, gender, and sexuality, to express hybridity and heterogeneity of the narrated identities, and for its potential to create intimacy in the language.
Copyright (c) 2023 Karolína Zlámalová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Care and Loyalty in the Closet: A review of scholarship on sexual identity disclosure in queer South Asian women
This paper highlights a gap in scholarship on personal and family relationships of British queer South Asian women and queer women of colour. It enables fields of study within queer theory, family sociology and intimate relationships to move beyond Western normative frames when looking at queer individuals and their relationships. Existing research on queer people of colour is limited and, where present, rarely focuses on diasporic British queer South Asian women. This paper looks at the diasporic context and highlights why the South Asian family unit should not be categorised as homophobic. It looks at how notions of ‘coming out’ and ‘the closet’ are Westernised and Eurocentric. It also looks at the use of ‘the closet’ as a shield emanating from a place of care for the family and self. This paper also presents queer women of colour as individuals who are moving beyond a binary of being queer and ostracised from family or as pretending to be straight to remain in their family, asking if this can also be the case for queer South Asians. Finally, throughout this paper, the discussion touches on the concept of ‘chosen families’ and how it may apply to queer South Asian women.
Copyright (c) 2023 Pooja Marwaha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cosmic Dancers, Cosmetic Shells: Exploring the Queer Potential of London’s Blitz in the Early Thatcher Era
This paper concentrates on the ways in which masculinity and male (homo)sexuality were challenged, depicted, and expressed within the New Romantic subculture of Margaret Thatcher’s first term (1979-1983). Centring on the subculture’s nucleus, the Blitz nightclub in London’s Covent Garden, which served as a safe space in which its clientele could explore their identities away from the prevailing Conservative ideology of the time, I examine the work of prominent figures who prompted reflections on attitudes towards mainstream gay visibility and the shift in representations of queerness within popular culture in Thatcher’s Britain. Considering the legacy of punk’s contradictory attitudes towards non-heterosexual identities and its ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos with questions of class, this paper questions the intersections of and tensions between identity and consumption under Thatcher. Tracking the rise of the young, arts-oriented demographic of the Blitz and those who facilitated the subculture’s move from outside, to inside of the mainstream popular music scene, namely Steve Strange of Visage and Boy George, I offer a queer reading of their output that illustrates the subversive subculture’s ability to bring non-heterosexual masculinities into mainstream popular music in early 1980s Britain, concurrently demonstrating that assessments of the subculture as being only aesthetically-oriented are too reductive.
Copyright (c) 2023 Chloë Edwards https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
An Essay in Conversation: Queer and Queering in the Prison
This essay is a conversation between two doctoral students interested in themes of queer and queering in the prison. We cover issues ranging from LGBTQ+ social exclusion to the housing of trans prisoners within the gendered prison service, all while negotiating our different backgrounds and experiences of the topics. The essay delves into the idea of “change” and the complexities of challenging the prison system, whether that is the old Victorian buildings, the institutionalisation of staff members, or existing prisoners. We reflect upon these challenges from our unique individual viewpoints within academia and as a practitioner psychologist. We introduce proposals for our own individual research projects which both aim to gain a greater understanding of the experiences of queer prisoners within the prison service, expanding upon the previous work conducted mostly within the USA but also more recently within UK prisons.
Copyright (c) 2023 Kayleigh Charlton, Sally Evans https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Outsider’s Space In-Between: Renegotiating Monstrosity in Contemporary Transgender Short Fiction
The image of trans monstrosity has been firmly anchored in mainstream North American popular culture, most notably through films such as Psycho, Dressed to Kill, and The Silence of the Lambs. This cultural vilification has had catastrophic effects on trans communities, stoking violence especially against trans-feminine people, promoting discrimination, and severely affecting trans people’s self-images. By analysing two contemporary short stories, Julian K. Jarboe’s I Am A Beautiful Bug! and A.K. Blue’s God Empress Susanna, this paper examines different approaches to the monster trope from trans perspectives and investigates the entanglements between trans identity, monstrosity, and disability.
Copyright (c) 2023 Steph Berens https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Queering the Fens: an exploration of land, supernatural, folklore and queer reproduction as art making
This essay refers to a body of work and research that considers the connections and intersections of the supernatural and Queerness. The project began with an exploration of ghost stories and their connection to repressed sexuality and identity, mediumship and its relationship to transgression of gender. This revealed notions of supernatural Queer male birth and how making art can embody this. A specific personal geographic location: the Lincolnshire Fens became important in its: liminality, landscape, wealth of folklore and connection to Queerness, politics, and the queer body’s relationship to the land. Working in a transdisciplinary manner I have produced charged and evocative time based media, using methods of creation related to mediumship and the supernatural. Particularly: performance, sculpture and drawing, woven into video installations. I have proposed speculative queer futures that challenge hegemony, examine queer identity and celebrate the downright weird.
Copyright (c) 2023 James Chantry https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"Lesbian with the attributes of a man: Is a trans history of male masochism possible?
This article is an attempt at presenting a case for thinking about male masochism—from its conceptual inception in late 19th century sexology, to its contemporary framing as a sexual practice falling under the umbrella of BDSM—as having close historical connections with the history of transness, and trans femininity in particular. In order to do so, I provide an overview of the way that the idea of male masochism as femininely gendered has been variously posited, contested, and disavowed across 130 years of masochism’s discursive history. Finally, I argue for the necessity of histories of trans femininity to accept speculative approaches as a valid way of thinking about the possibilities of trans history, and ask what political ends have been served by the “cisisfication” of masochism and practices of sexual submissiveness, which is rendering them culturally legible as having nothing to do with their practitioners’ gender.
Copyright (c) 2023 Jay Szpilka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"How Did We Get Here?" Etiology and Erasure in Trans History
This article provides an overview of trans historiography, whose dominant form is etiological, searching for origin of contemporary categories of trans gender. Performing my own etiology of this historiographic tendency, I show the ways that it mirrors historic treatments of trans subjects, in privileging categories of body and identity over the lived realities of people and their communities. This academic fixation only repeats the historic and contemporary erasure that characterises transgender people’s everyday, and reduces the conceptual possibilities for trans thought and life.
Copyright (c) 2023 Tomara Garrod https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Foreword: Exploring the Meaning of Outside/rs
Outside/rs 2022 was a postgraduate conference held on 2nd and 3rd April 2022 at the University of Brighton. The conference aimed to build a common understanding of the challenges in accounting for what we called Outsider experiences and positions, as they relate to gender, sex and sexualities. We invited criticisms, definitions and explorations of what Outside/rs might mean in relation to queerness, transness and beyond. This Excursions Special Issue showcases selected papers from this conference to continue the conversations we began at Outside/rs 2022.
Copyright (c) 2023 Ashley Reilly-Thornton, Joe Jukes, Marielle O'Neill, Mélanie Salvi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this exclusive interview between Pakistani authors Saba Karim Khan and Mohsin Hamid, Mohsin Hamid discusses his complex relationship with the concept of home.
Copyright (c) 2022 Saba Karim Khan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
‘Bobbos of Ahun’ is a photo essay about women from my paternal family residing in our native village called Ahun, documenting their negotiations within the patriarchal home through stories of everyday struggles and resistance. ‘Bobbo’ is a term of endearment which loosely translates to ‘a little girl’ in Haryanvi while Ahun is a speck in the universe, a small hamlet in the state of Haryana, India. The village is inhabited by families who are dependent on small-scale farming of paddy and wheat along with raising cattle. By photographing these women in their familial space, I look at home as a gendered site where contestations, of labour (visible and invisible), of self and family identity, of longing, belonging and estrangement, of care and neglect, happen every day. I speak about the complex metaphor of home, both as an inhabited space and portable feeling by photographing my grandmother, cousins, sisters, aunts and neighbours residing in Ahun. The photographs narrate stories of these women who remain displaced from the home because of gender roles and fear of community sanctions.
Copyright (c) 2022 Chitrangada Sharma https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Rooms for Loss: Literature and Healing at Home
In March 2020, I received an email instructing me not to come back to campus to continue my coursework in person. My husband and I had recently bought a 1900 American Foursquare HUD house to restore, exploring our own spatial dimensions as renovators and first-time homeowners of a broken, rundown home we yearned to bring back to life. The interiority of the monastic experience that I loved to read about and research suddenly mirrored my own experience of being a PhD student during a pandemic. Silva Martinez-Falquina uses the term “literary activism” to telegraph how literature has the ability to move people to action. She applies this concept to Louise Erdrich’s 2017 dystopian novel Future Home of the Living God, which is as much about home and belonging as about social fear, oppression, and reproductive rights. Reading about Cedar Hawk Songmaker’s decision to house her baby as the conservative government collects pregnant people for experimentation as my own growing baby kicked the novel’s hard cover from its resting place on my stomach, I circled back to the spatial dimensions of grief and loss, mourning the loss of my own “normal” pregnancy and birth experience. This article is as much an exploration of trauma and literature as a healing mechanism as it is a memoir of my own understanding of home and its iterations during 2020’s incalculable transformations.
Copyright (c) 2022 Lindsey Nicole Moser https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper offers a representation of the author’s experiences of home during the Covid 19 pandemic, experienced from the autoethnographic perspective of an arts practitioner. The theme is explored in the experimental spaces and intersections ‘between screens’ (home/work, virtual/actual, digital/textile, professional/domestic, academic/creative). The enquiry is pursued through an interdisciplinary practice, which generates both theory through practice and a theorised practice, to enact and illuminate the entanglement of the professional/domestic, embodied by this artist/mother/lecturer/Ph.D. candidate whilst performing her/my role(s) and homeworking within the domestic environment. Viewing Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film, Jeanne Deilman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles in early lockdown was instrumental in thinking through this professional/domestic ‘work(wo)manship’ (my neologisms). When witnessed through Microsoft TEAMS and Zoom technologies, domestic gestures become lasting artefacts of daily house/home life, whilst also operating as a method of arts production. My intention is to develop a practice-based discourse on the professional/domestic phenomenon of working from home, situated between Jeanne Dielman and Bracha L. Ettinger, as a method to reflect upon the (in)visibility of occupations in the home. Professional/domestic life is explored through my D.I.Y. matrixial making methods to address how work(wo)manship can be ‘pieced’ or ‘stitched’ together, and where the (im)materiality of the screen is (re)positioned between textile theory and digital assemblage, intertwined with bricolage, assemblage, matrixial theory and art activism as a context for making work(wo)manship visible.
Copyright (c) 2022 Shellie Holden https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Architecture of the House as an Expression of Identity: Topoanalysis of Guilherme de Almeida's Historic House Museum
The architectural elements and interior design choices observable within a historic house museum of an intimate memory can express an identity. Such institutions often build narratives about the home, relating the moment when the honouree had inhabited the house to the cultural aspects of the visitors of the museum. In this sense, a physical and visible world (aspects related to the architecture) reflect intangible, abstract elements (non-physical aspects related to memory). The home thus transcends its sense of shelter to denote traces of personality and functional habits. When transforming a house into a museum while preserving the physical elements, institutions will do well in recognising such aspects as sources of information about the former residents. For that matter, this paper suggests a phenomenological analysis as the means to understand identity traces in spatial elements of a preserved home. As an example of the existent relations between physical and non-physical aspects of architecture and memory, we present a literature review and the analysis of a single case study: the Historic House Museum Casa Guilherme de Almeida, located in São Paulo, Brazil. This study is part of the doctoral thesis developed by the author, which integrates other cases and methods.
Copyright (c) 2022 Raissa de Albuquerque Gameleira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Living In-Between: On the Identity Breaklines of Albert Memmi’s La Statue de Sel
This article analyses the problem of identity in the ambiguous coexistence of belonging and alienation found in Albert Memmi's semi-autobiographical La Statue de Sel (1953). It demonstrates how the protagonist and his author dwell in a temporary space between these two dimensions. The novel, as the debut of Memmi's literary career, has the peculiarity of initiating tears in the fabric of identity. Through close analysis, three threads are observed and considered: homeland, society and language. These threads are unpicked through the theoretical lens of two European philosophers: Bourdieu in relation to the protagonist's borderline occupation of disparate social fields and the instable detention of capital; and Derrida with regards to the lack of possession of any known languages as a consequence of colonialism. Both thinkers shed light on the identity struggles of the young Memmi who, on the threshold of Tunisian independence, experiences a liminal condition as manifested in each of the three threads, that is, he epitomises the point between the ‘no more’ and the ‘not yet’ that animates his identity crisis.
Copyright (c) 2022 Valeria Giudici https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Can They Call Japan Home? Japanese Nationalism and Unskilled Labour Immigrants
Japan is currently facing a demographic crisis with a labour population that remains exclusive against immigrants. Japanese national identity, based on homogeneity of race and culture, has informed immigration policy. While the Technical Intern Trainees Program (TITP) provides an immigrant labour supply in the primary sector of industry, it has been criticized as a human trafficking system under the guise of international development. In 2019, the government introduced a new visa status called Specified Skilled Workers (SSW), allowing the possibility of legitimised settlement in Japan for immigrant workers and their families. This historical shift enables those in the TITP to extend their working period with a legal transition to SSW. Nevertheless, there are concerns that SSW may share similar problems with TITP. Consequently, although SSW represents a major shift in immigration policy, it does not necessarily represent a change in the government’s fundamental stance and attitude towards unskilled labour immigrants. This paper therefore aims to further examine current attitudes in immigration policy to determine whether unskilled labour immigrants can call Japan home.
Copyright (c) 2022 Yusuke Yasuda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Art, Memory, and the Absent Ones: What Hannah Arendt, Doris Salcedo, and The OA Tell Us About Homelessness
This paper maps Hannah Arendt’s (1958) phenomenological categories of the private, public, and the social onto the experience of homelessness under neoliberalism. Amidst what is better expressed as contemporary practices of “dehousing” (Hulchanski et al., 2009, p. 3), we require contestations of the political malaise that perpetuates this violence; we are in need of new things. I argue that a revitalizing of the political can be found within forms of artistic practice. The work of Doris Salcedo engages the recovery of absent citizens, memory, and publicness, while strategically blurring Arendtian public/private distinctions. Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s (2016) TV show, The OA, offers a way to imagine a world outside the ‘false public’ and its inversion, the ‘false private’ realm of contemporary homelessness. In borrowing from theorists like Wendy Brown (2006, 2011, 2015), Bonnie Honig (1992, 2013, 2017), and others, I argue that Salcedo and The OA illustrate the role of aesthetic practice in restoring the private realm, which in turn can open up venues of encounter. Such a work of recovery is necessary in imagining — and pursuing — an alternative future, one in which citizens have a shelter from which to emerge, be heard and seen in public.
Copyright (c) 2022 timothy martin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Home is a complex signifier. It is a space which every individual will experience differently, imbued with contradiction, and deserving of academic attention. In this issue, Excursions Journal invited researchers to speak about its multiple meanings from a variety of disciplines.
Copyright (c) 2022 Laura Gallon and Harry Lewis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Humanitarian Storyteller: (Re)connecting Academia and Society Through a Public Exhibition
Copyright (c) 2021 Madhushala Senaratne https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2021 Manuela Salazar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Politics PhD Student’s Experience of Reaching Out
Copyright (c) 2021 James Prentice https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sitting in Rose’s ‘Broken Middle’ on a North London State
Copyright (c) 2021 Christopher McDermott https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Beyond Bench to Bedside: Empowerment, Engagement, and Advocacy
Copyright (c) 2021 Stephanie Saunders https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reading Domestic Noir Novels Together in Brighton and Hove
Copyright (c) 2021 Katharina Hendrickx https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Could Industry-Funded PhDs Be the Future of Academic Impact?
Copyright (c) 2021 Maruša Levstek https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
How Science Communication Helped Me Find my Identity as a Scientist
Copyright (c) 2021 Sophie Milbourne https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Foreword: (Re)Connect, (Re)Establish a Bond
In this issue, Excursions Journal invited researchers to (re)connect. The articles assembled here speak about this wide variety of possible approaches and perspectives, highlighting the (re)connections that shape our social and individual lives.
Copyright (c) 2021 Louise Elali; Ricardo Ramirez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0