On Gender Performance

A manifesto against the current moralizing trend in the arts.

Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines.

Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.

"What if ambivalences were seen as productive, and not a danger to erase? Would we not begin to know ourselves better? What is it that we are so afraid of finding out? Art is a testing ground for ideas, a means of reaching. What a shame, if we use the space it offers to destroy it entirely."

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in East Sussex and the author of Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity (2019) and Sinkhole (2023). Her writing on art and culture has featured in ArtReview, Frieze, Granta, The Guardian, and The White Review, among other publications. Between 2021 and 2023 she was co-editor of The White Review.

Alien worlds, alter-egos, and Pleasure Domes–Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation explores the overlooked importance of science-fiction fandom and the occult to U.S. queer history.

Science fiction and occult communities helped pave the way for the LGBTQ+ movement by providing a place for individuals to meet, imagine, and create a life less restricted by societal norms. Focusing on Los Angeles from the late 1930s through the 1950s, this reader follows the lives of artists, writers, publishers, early sci-fi enthusiasts, and progressive communities, from Kenneth Anger, Lisa Ben, and Jack Parsons to the L.A. Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) and Ordo Templi Orientis at the Agape Lodge (O.T.O.).

Spanning sci-fi fandom, aerospace, queer history, and the occult, Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A. reveals how visionary artists, filmmakers, scientists, science-fiction writers and fans worked together to build a world of their own making. Featuring copious illustrations of salacious pulps, ritual paintings, and archival materials, authors Joseph Hawkins, Joan Lubin, Alexis Bard Johnson, Ben Miller, Judith Noble, Kelly Filreis, and Susan Aberth tell the interconnected stories behind the underground communities of early Los Angeles. This publication is made possible with support from Getty through its PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

From 1972 to 1974, the anonymous writers of Social Disease offered groundbreaking, incisive, and sweeping critiques of social relationships through the lens of Situationism. Arguing that true revolution — the kind of complete and irreversible revolution longed for in the wake of such revolutionary moments as the May 1968 student uprisings and the 1969 Stonewall riots— would change every aspect of society, it was clear that affective relationships — how we love, how we feel pleasure— would necessarily be changed as well, and thus deserved examination as much as the traditional questions of labor or politics. The voices in the essays speak with urgency, and do not compromise in their expression. Beyond the theoretical insights of the text, the emotional truth of history comes through in the spaces of contradiction, and allusions to intercommunity conflicts. These essays were written without constraints for an immediate audience of comrades and peers; with this translation of the collection, that audience now includes us.

"Translating from the French, Mar Stratford's MISERE DU L'AMOUR captures the urgency, passion, and drama of 1970s gay leftism. MISERE DU L'AMOUR asks questions that persist: what does a better world look like? What is the true nature of love? Can we fuck and suck our way to liberation?The questions asked by F.H.A.R in the 1970s have a relevance to today's discourse that Stratford's translation animates. Tell your friends, your lovers, and your haters." —Brendan Williams-Childs

"The Misery of Love" & Other Essays From Social Disease / “Misère de l'amour” & autres textes de le flèau social. Bound with staples. Covers printed on Mohawk off-white cardstock, with front cover image hand colored with pencil and marker. Interiors printed on bright white French text weight paper. Printed and assembled in "Kingston, New York,” the unceded and occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke tribes.

Designed by The Aliens.

Sarahland est un ouvrage de fiction américain contemporain qui se découpe en dix nouvelles, toutes reliées par les personnages de Sarahs et leurs parcours initiatiques à la fin de l’adolescence. Sam Cohen, autrice queer et juive, déploie un univers drôle et piquant autour des notions d’identité, de transition, de transformation, d’émancipation et d’apprentissage. Au fil d’histoires inventives, l’autrice explore la manière dont les narratifs qui nous sont assignés, les récits traditionnels, les identités qui nous pré-existent, sont dépassables. Elle construit alors avec ses personnages — presque toutes prénommées Sarah — de nouvelles histoires pour leurs passés ou leurs futurs, de nouvelles façon d’aimer la terre et ceux qui la peuplent, de nouvelles possibilités de vie en soi. Dans le refus pour chaque Sarah d’adhérer à un récit unique et uniformisant, l’autrice propose un lieu potentiellement meilleur pour nous toustes, un espace narratif qui n’exige aucune fixation de soi, aucune injonction consumériste, aucun compromis corporel: un lieu appelé Sarahland.

Née à Detroit aux États-unis, Sam Cohen vit et travaille actuellement à Los Angeles. Elle est une autrice de fiction dont les romans explorent des thèmes à l’intersection du féminisme, des études queers, et des pensées juives. Après avoir publié dans différentes anthologies et revues littéraires (Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga, Weird Sister Collection, etc.), elle publie en 2021 Sarahland, un recueil de nouvelles. Elle enseigne l’écriture à l’université en tant que professeur d’écriture créative. Elle a été nommée et à gagné à de nombreux prix littéraires, notamment le ALMA Award (Best Jewish Story Collection of 2021), le Jewish Women’s Archive Book List, le Golden Poppy Award in Fiction (finaliste) ou encore le Chautauqua Janus Prize. Elle est en cours d’écriture de son prochain livre.

A long lost poem purportedly by Rimbaud is finally made available in English.

Referenced only in a few letters of Paul Verlaine, The Spiritual Hunt is Arthur Rimbaud's forgotten masterwork, a poem in five parts that explored the mystic philosophy that guided the young poet's heart and hand. Considered lost for years, a typewritten manuscript appeared in Paris in the late 1920s, circulating around a close-knit group of booksellers, poets, and playwrights. Yet it wasn't until 1949 that Mercure de France took the initiative to publish the unauthenticated galley and unleashed a literary controversy that shook France. Sides were drawn, with Andre Breton leading the charge of forgery, calling the work an utter hoax, and others defending it as legitimate and an essential key to understanding Rimbaud and his work. Bookstores were raided for copies, critics were skewered in journals, and tempers flared on radio and in print, but no conclusive judgement could be drawn and Mercure de France withdrew the work from publication and pulped all the copies they could find.

Now, seventy-five years after its initial imbroglio, The Spiritual Hunt is available in English for the first time with a facsimile letterpress edition of the original. Featuring Pascal Pia's original introduction along with an edifying afterword by translator Emine Ersoy.

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol 2 ‘discores’ is written by Kexin Hao, Luca Soudant, HaYoung, Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen. Five strangers are stuck in changing boots next to each other and decide to embark on an intimate conversation starting from the question: “What is troubling your sexuality at the moment?”.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances.