So Mayer ed.
catflap is the annual publication of new queer writing from Outburst Arts, a hot mix of open call submissions, curated interviews and smart queer writing with a disco heart.
An essay on art, bodies and fascism.
In an era where identity politics is being weaponised against the very people it has sought to make visible, how can we reclaim complexity?
In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized modernist artworks. Named Entartete ‘Kunst’ – Degenerate ‘Art’ – it sought to define degeneracy, display it and destroy it.This act of violent appropriation is one episode in a long and ongoing history of the erasure of queer and non-normative cultures.
A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing works against this erasure; it is a manifesto – a catalogue for an exhibition that could never take place. Drawing on work from dissident sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to South African artist Zanele Muholi, as well as a century of queer cinema from Sergei Eisenstein to Pedro Almodóvar, So Mayer creates an archive of resistance.
‘This book is a small revolution that becomes a party that you won’t be leaving soon. I believe we’re living in a time of fresh erasures, systemic violences working that global pandemic to take some other bodies out. Looking so freshly at the history of queerness, sexual deviance and the long long coordinated erasures of colonialism, bigotry and transphobia the essential non binary nature of art opens up right here like the wildly singing flower it is and So Mayer’s compelling version makes sense, makes me listen.’
— Eileen Myles
‘A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing is a reflective, creative walk through some of the worst – and best – people of the last hundred years, looking at the power of images and their relationship(s) with text. In a time of rising fascism, So Mayer highlights ways that artists have found strategies of resistance, and offers hope in historical analysis.’
— Juliet Jacques
This collection of essays celebrates the work of international feminist filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, filmmakers, essayists and activists, On Feminist Films is the second volume in the South London Cultural Review series. Contributors include: Stuart Bell, Catherine Grant, So Mayer, Louisa Wei, Emma Wilson.
Set against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s, Vivian Blaxell takes us on a witty and expansive sweep through history, from Australia to Japan, to Hawai’i to Mexico, to heretofore unmapped regions of the mind. In seven devastatingly intelligent parts, her essay covers a vast range in time and space — from the arson of a Japanese temple to a transformative encounter with a coral reef, from Nietzsche and Hegel to Indigenous metaphysics, from a perplexing relationship with a beautiful man to the unknowable minds of animals. Fleshy and philosophical, searching and exalted, utterly distinctive and assured, Worthy of the Event belatedly establishes Vivian Blaxell as one of the major writers of her generation.
Marina Mardas, François Peyroux and 1 more
How can we define and document our present?
Postmortem is a sensitive yet critical metaphor for a world suspended between collapse and reinvention—a diary of the now. Drawing together writers and artists from Europe and the SWANA region, this issue locates areas of tension that define our era. Far from a mere dialogue between regions, it exposes the inner and outer fractures of Western hegemony, unearthing shared emotions.
From reclaiming histories and narratives in the Arab world to deconstructing digital spaces as arenas of control and resistance—even exposing systemic exclusions embedded in blood donation policies—contributors reveal these tensions as a fertile terrain for dialogue and reflection.
Through critical essays, narrative writing, poetry, interviews, and contemporary art, the concept of Postmortem unfolds an in-between state where death and rebirth occur simultaneously. Across three interwoven chapters—Metaconnexion, Dissociation, and Fragmentation—the issue engages radically with body politics, othering, post-orientalism, surveillance, decoloniality, freedom, and resistance.
Both a chronicle and a hybrid object where text, design, and image interact, Postmortem archives a world in flux. Rather than prognosticate, it dissects the present as the essential site for reimagining our future.
Contributors : Sara El-Jazara, François Peyroux, Nadine Makarem, Soukaina Melhaoui, Louise Mervelet, Manon Schaefle, Marina Mardas, Irina Breitenstein, Amer Al-Dakar
The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.
In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both historic and present.
Chickens have a collective soul. Heaven is full of the skateboarders you kissed in middle school. If the algorithm is its own hell, Lauren Cook, author of the critically (and uncritically) acclaimed Sex Goblin, stands in front of it fully armored. I Love Shopping invites its readers to inhabit a world just like ours, reflected through a big, benevolent funhouse mirror.
First published in a limited edition, this is the first trade edition of the cult classic.
Featuring work by Sara M Saleh, Joni Prince, Shatr Collective, Carlos Soto Román, Petra Kuppers, Diane Ward, Dianna Settles, Mayra Santos-Febres translated by Seth Michelson, Elena Gomez & Chelsea Hart, Noah Mazer, Daniel Borzutzky, Ash(ley) Michelle C., Ghazal Mosadeq, Darius Simpson, Mohammed Zenia, Mario Payeras translated by Dan Eltringham, Ferreira Gullar translated by Chris Daniels, Christophe Tarkos translated & read by Marty Hiatt, Andrew Spragg on Tom Raworth, Matthew Rana on Ida Börjel, & Paisley Conrad on Harryette Mullen