Girls Like Us #8 - Family

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

This publication comprises a series of interviews with contemporary artists, musicians, and writers who are in dialogue with Beirut and Cairo. While not purporting to be an overview of the art scenes in these cities, this book begins to draw a picture of how artists think about what it means to be active in the contexts of these cities. It offers insight into the circumstances that structured these artists’ stories, and the often accidental influences that have shaped how their practices have developed.

Two clock-faces are staring at each other.
They are two sides of one thing, as different as they are the same.
They move as two bodies revolving around each other, into a tender embrace.
A kiss, made of time, in time.
Mirrored shape shifters, their hour-numbers climbing on each other's shoulders.
Running up against the limits of their own usefulness, clocklikeness.

A book by Katja Mater, with a text by Amelia Groom designed by Elisabeth Klement
79 clocks, 192 pages, open spine, 17 × 21 cm
Printed by Wilco Art Books on Arena White Rough by Fedrigoni 

Speed Glum Hero. Read it as an instruction: Speed, Glum Hero. Read it as an assertion of life, like, keep living, go on. It takes this kind of serious play to make any sense of this moment we are living through. This is a pamphlet about subjectivity splintering, substance, and legend. This is a pamphlet about complicity, tenderness, and distress. This is a pamphlet about what it takes to stay gripping to the earth. The only way out is through.

D Mortimer is a writer and artist from London interested in the crip unknown. Their first book Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. Mortimer is a Techne scholar in trans auto fictions at The University of Roehampton. Their work concerns technologies of madness and their doctoral project is entitled, Beef Journals: Naming the Uncertain in Transgender Subject Formation.

“Een thematisch nummer maken over trans*esthetiek riskeert trans*heid meteen als iets aparts te signaleren, als iets wat niet simpelweg kan zijn; hoe stel je ‘gewoon’ een special issue samen?”

Het nummer werd samengesteld door Dagmar Bosma, Hans Demeyer en Sven Van den Bossche.

Met bijdrages van: Ada M. Patterson, Camille Pier, Sven Van den Bossche, Alara Adilow, Nour Helou & Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, Mariken Heitman, misha verdonck, Dagmar Bosma, Hans Demeyer, Torrey Peters, Kato Trieu, Valentijn Hoogenkamp, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Lieks Hettinga, Kalib Batta, Kopano Maroga, Hannah Chris Lomans en Nele Buyst.

A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive―to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.

In Survival Is a Promise , Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.

In Noah Ross's new book THE DOGS, Ross opens the question of authority and possession in what he deems an illicit act of translation. THE DOGS may begin with Herve Guibert's Les Chiens, but through multiple reiterations of translation, Guibert's text ultimately meets Ross to celebrate, among other sources, Marie de France, Teen Wolf, Auden, and Dom Orejudos in establishing a unique pack of hungry werewolves. You know what happens when werewolves get together: the play can get a little rough. THE DOGS empowers these snarls and yips, growls and howls, on the level of the sentence in translation as much as the embodied erotogenic zones of the body.

This second print issue contains an interview with the abolitionist organizer Stevie Wilson, essays about nineties nightlife in support of queer intimacies in Santiago, Chile, Barbz against pinkwashing, a translation of the communization theorist Gilles Dauvé’s latest work on the reactionary tendencies in the sexual liberation movement in Weimar Germany, a missive by Samuel R. Delany, a ritual script by Lou Cornum, a meditation on intersex experiences as the untheorized marrow of trans liberation, and more. There are also world-building drawings by the artist Chitra Ganesh throughout.