- Venue
- Good Press
- Date
- Thursday, February 13, 2025
06:00 PM - Address
- 32 St. Andrews St, Glasgow G1 5PD
- Location
- Scotland
- Organiser
- 16 Collective - (Formerly 16 Nicholson Street) - at Good Press
A launch of a new book published by 16NSt Gallery Press, the writing of which accompanied research and development for Hush lil baby…–a solo exhibition of Shae Myles’s work curated by 16 Collective (2023). The event will feature readings by Femme Castratrice, Chloe Filani, 16 Collective, Kika Sroka-Miller, and a talk by Shae Myles.
This publication is a compilation of personal takes and essays exploring the notion of femme via the prompt of the Polly Pocket play kingdom. Written in our grown-up houses, the texts illustrate various introspective and reflective journeys of reconnection with the dollhouses of our childhoods – relics of the 90s. This is a playful and serious contribution to the discourse around femme identity that revisits its connotations with becoming, simulacra and camp.
The doll has been a meaningful motif in aesthetic production, which references the history of play, its role in coming-of-age constructions of queer identity, and its ambiguous position that is at once game, object, performance and commodity. Critics have explored dolls in aesthetic practice (of artists such as Laurie Simmons and Gillian Wearing) as psychoanalytic formulations of subjectivity, projection, simulacrum and interpellation. The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (1992) contains many foundational texts for this collection. We revisit works like Femme-inism by Paula Austin and Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp. Despite themes both heavy and light, it was essential to us to foreground queer joy and jouissance, of which we hope you will find a lot of here.
Designed by talented Nänni-pää the book features Myles’s drawings and pictures of the exhibition documenting her giant Polly Pocket sculpture as a girl’s bedroom – the messy, tragic victorious horny domestic. While the texts offer perspectives from various intersections on the femme experience spectrum. The writing wrestles with the sticky, lurid fabric of nostalgia and sexuality. Some of this is epitomised by Sophie Robinson’s reflective essay You fit in my fist: a bimboification of the heart which looks at themes like inner child work, cuteness and eroticism (CW// sexual violence). Nell Cardozo’s fantasy erotic flash fiction follows Chloe Filani’s two love-full poems exploring black femme joy. Aga Paulina Młyńczak’s essay will take you into the soft bi territory of the butch-femme dynamic while – in her confessional piece – Chao-Ying Rao will lavish you with (solo) self-love. Kika Sroka-Miller offers an essay on femme doms in seven conceptual vignettes. The final chapter is the Glossy-ary by Kelly Rappleye, which features a collection of femme terms from across the whole book to satisfy your curiosity and foster the pleasure of shared language.
