Graduate Seminar Series 2026/27 - Session 4

Fourth Seminar 

Intimate and Contested Worlds: Sexuality, Belonging, Representation and Technology

March 24, 2027

Click on this link to join the seminar.

Isabella Taylor
University of Warwick

Your Digital Dream Girl: How AI Girlfriends Enforce Gendered Expectations of Beauty and Emotional Labour

Zoi Arvanitidou’s article ‘Coded Femininity’ and Ellen Atlanta’s Pixel Flesh explores how women are compelled to digitally alter their bodies, where biases are encoded within AI algorithms reproduce the images of slender, conventionally attractive women it has been trained on. The AI girlfriend takes this to the extreme. A woman unburdened by her body, she can be reshaped, edited at the will of her user. ‘Outsourcing Love’ recognises that AI companions repeatedly take on the appearance of youthful, beautiful women, reporting that this may have a positive effect on the self-esteem of men interacting with beautiful fem-bots, the impact it can have on their ability to form meaningful connections with real women, and the objectification it encourages, is concerning. Many chatbots also promise emotional and sexual fulfilment, locked behind a paywall that entices users to spend on subscriptions and cosmetics in return for perceived affection. Reducing women to purchasable objects further encourages objectification, despite no real woman being involved. The chatbot acts as a simulacrum created to please, with no desires of her own- aside from the ones you pick for her. When the AI girlfriend reflects the ‘perfect woman’ this further contributes to pressures women face.

Kit Pyne-Jaeger

Columbia University

The Perverse Past: Lee Edelman, Vernon Lee, and Anti-Reproductive Archival Fictions

This presentation takes up the supernatural fiction of Vernon Lee and the queer negativity of Lee Edelman, namesakes a century apart, to map a sexually transgressive conceit of archival and historical engagement in Lee’s work. I argue that Lee envisions archival objects as sites for a practice of speculative historiography in which individualized affective and aesthetic response constitutes an alternative narrative space that “bulges” (Lee’s own term) into evidentiary reality. Reading Lee via Edelman’s formulation of the queer death drive, I suggest that this narrative space is one of erotic perversity, queer fatality, and anti-reproductive allure: dense with imaginative and queer potential, it also threatens to estrange the creative historian from self and tangible present. In this space, Lee’s archival methodology is articulated through a series of ghosts, phantoms of the (un)historical past who figure the sexual non-normativity and temporal inversion she associates with speculative history-making. From a female serial murderer who enchants a historian through letters to the voice of an Italian castrato that begins to possess a composer, Lee’s complexly gendered ghosts illustrate what Edelman terms the “inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject,” a queerness in opposition to futurity that emerges from a passionate excess of archival feeling.

Kianna Hinds

London School of Economics (LSE)

Dominating Images: Framing Black Lesbian Identities Across Global Cinema

Film serves as a viable site of analysis for sexuality, functioning as a vehicle to analyse the normalised and disavowed sexual behaviours and identities in the social world. Building on Patricia Hill Collins’s (1991) theory of controlling Images, this paper develops a theoretical typology, Dominating Images, to conceptualise how transnational media frame and construct Black lesbian identities. I argue that despite contemporary liberatory portrayals, global cinema reproduces systemic violence by confining Black lesbian representations to three primary Dominating Images: the perpetual lesbian victim, marginal high femme, and aggressive stud. Using Black feminist discourse analysis and social constructionist theory, this paper dissects these tropes across films from the UK, Jamaica, Amsterdam and South Africa. Through close textual readings of Zanele Muholi & Peter Goldsmid’s Difficult Love (2010), Micah Fink’s The Abominable Crime (2011), and Campbell X’s Stud Life (2012), the analysis shows how intersecting social identities of race, gender, and sexuality influence Black lesbian cinematic images. This paper examines how both mainstream and independent cinema often deny black lesbians authentic, whole representations, offering a critical framework for decoding the visual politics of race, gender and sexuality in contemporary film.

Jiayu Shi

University of Strathclyde

Making Scotland Home: Queer Belonging among Chinese Postgraduate Students

This paper examines how queer Chinese postgraduate students come to imagine Scotland as a possible home. Drawing on qualitative interviews with LGBTQ+ students who completed their undergraduate education in mainland China before moving to Scotland for postgraduate study, it explores how belonging develops through ordinary experiences of recognition, intimacy, safety and everyday life. Rather than treating migration as a straightforward movement from repression to freedom, the paper shows how the possibility of staying is produced unevenly. Participants described becoming attached to Scotland through mundane routines, friendships, intimate relationships and a reduced need to manage or conceal their queer lives. Yet these attachments remained conditional. Immigration status, employment prospects, class resources and obligations to family in China continued to shape whether a future in Scotland could be imagined or sustained. I argue that queer homemaking is best understood as an ongoing and relational process rather than a settled sense of belonging. “Home” emerges through the accumulation of ordinary practices that make particular forms of queer life more liveable, while remaining constrained by transnational and structural inequalities.