Transgressive Identities and Subjectivities – BCMCR Research Theme 2024-2026

This research theme, led by myself (Dr Poppy Wilde) and Dr Matt Grimes, focuses on the impact of media in shaping cultural identities and subjectivities. We use these two terms to indicate the shifting understandings of selfhood that occur across media and cultural studies, in order to be attendant to the affects and effects that are shaped beyond the individual. This can operate across media influences of fandoms and communities, but here we propose the theme takes a specific focus on transgression, and transgressive identities and subjectivities.

Jenks (2003) argues that “[t]ransgression is a deeply reflexive act” that “serves as an extremely sensitive vector in assessing the scope, direction and compass of any social theory.” This theme therefore allows us to consider how media and culture enables people to move outside of the spaces of expected conformity, to deny and affirm different modes of being and selfhood. This occurs through transgressing (cis-hetero)normative bodies and sexualities, creating alternative political and economic models, to the specific ways multi-media forms might capture a desire for being beyond – beyond norms, beyond boundaries, and beyond convention.

Discussing our understanding of “transgression”, Wolfreys (2008) poses that although it may have a broad understanding, transgression is deeper than a form of deviance, and instead “is the very pulse that constitutes our identities, and we would have no sense of our own subjectivity were it not for a constant, if discontinuous negotiation with the transgressive otherness by which we are formed and informed”. In a world dominated by cultural crises – economic, ecological, identity-based (e.g. the “crisis” of masculinity), etc. – we wish to explore how transgression is practised, embodied, and displayed, what transgression can do for the self, and how its impact on wider culture and society can be understood.

However, as Mortensen and Jørgensen (2020) state,

“[w]hen transgressive practices are integrated into culture, […] these practices are accepted into a particular cultural context in which they are rarely experienced as profoundly transgressive”.

We will therefore use this theme as an opportunity to explore both the potentials and the limitations of transgression and transgression of “selfhood” in media and culture. This is particularly pertinent at present, where, in the current UK context, expressions of transgression are being stifled and stymied through, for example, restrictive new laws on public protest (Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022).

Over the 2024-2026 academic years we aim to run a variety of events and explore publication options related to gathering research outputs centred around this theme, as well as drawing together teaching resources to feed into our newly accredited media courses.