Listening Like A Girl...LIVE!

This is a free post for Supersensual! To support Juliana's tour and writing, you can sign up as a supporter here.

Listening's debut was part of the opening night for the three-day Unsex Me Here fest in Berlin.

Berlin avantgarde drag icon Olympia Bukkakis invited me back on stage to read from Listening, and then discuss the role that communities play in my writing (and all our lives!)

My reading was to a delightful crowd, that hit the building's max capacity. Thanks so much to all of you who made it!

Our conversation together addressed both topical concerns⸺from the recent Berlin police raid, to that notorious Covid-conscious dyke bar⸺and the longer heritage of drag as a gay channel for unpalatable truths. The session was billed as tackling 'kinship relations from a materialist perspective', and ended up as something of a showcase of both our careers: Olympia had brought along all three of my books, so we compared intersex, trans and non-binary experiences (trying to figure out which drag counts as, and why). Olympia spoke about her work organising dragshows everywhere from the high art venue Sophiensaele, to the cruising forests of Hasenheide, and put a compelling case for drag queens as queer life's organic intellectuals (while my reading introduced dancers as organic listeners).

The kind of writing I do often percolates through the world quite slowly. While a stand-up set either hits or bombs, with philosophy or history it can take a while for even the best-intentioned people to read, absorb, and then bring back into the world. Sometimes it can be lonely, nerve-wracking, or even hopeless putting out insights in books (rather than one-liners, cheapshots or soundbites).

So I cherish moments like this weekend, for providing me several chances to see how my thinking has reshaped the way truly excellent people interact with political struggles, and both the beautiful and infuriating faces of the communities which make our lives possible!

Our chat followed a dance piece exploring symmetry and ageing by Maria Scaroni and Stephanie Maher. By turns harmonious and dissonant in their positioning towards each other, I followed the act by reading a section of Listening addressing dance as a type of demonstrative bodily attention.

The next night I checked out Olympia's "end of class" show, with dance students (informed by my essay on encounters and communities) now staging a drag revue that manifested our unsexy theme variously: from a diva held aloft by adoring minions on bean bags, to a forceful homage to Britney's prime, to a prowling drag king theory bro (doing what they always do...)

As always:

Delights abound in Wedding!

Tomorrow I will be speaking at the Edinburgh Radical Bookfair!

Then this coming Wednesday 11th November, I will be reading from Listening at Glasgow's legendary queer bookstore, Category Is. Free event but space is limited, so sign up here!

I will then be speaking on 23rd November at Hafi Books, in Vienna (Austria). Do purchase tickets here, before they sell out!

Then (again!) at London's iconic left bookstore Housmans, on December 2nd.

I am planning more events in both Vienna and LDN (location TBA!) Please do let me know if you have any suggestions or connections!

Although it's not officially dropping until November 20th, I've already spotted copies on the stands here in Edinburgh:

And my friend Ben Trott sent along this sighting of Listening as Historical Materialism (also happening this weekend, in west London):

As always, write to me any and all suggestions, recommendations, dire warnings, tidings, poems, augeries, commissions or prophecies.

And do come through to see the show!

As an exclusive for my supporters, here is the passage which I read out in Wedding:

DANCE AS LISTENING