Talk 3: Unsafe Space: Trans Anxieties in Digital Horror - Mars Nicoli

Saturday 10th February / 15:00 / City Kino Wedding

Unsafe Spaces: Trans Anxieties in Digital Horror by Mars Nicoli

In the last decade, the internet has taken an increasingly central role as a social space, with many horror works navigating the dangers and fears of this new social dimension. This talk explores the role of online social spaces in transgender horror narratives through the works of transgender artists like filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun – A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018), We’re All Going To The World’s Fair (2022) - and author Alison Rumfitt – Tell me I’m Worthless (2021), Brainwyrms (2023). The internet offers the only (perceived) safe spaces for otherwise socially isolated or shunned characters to explore secret parts of themselves – as is the reality for many trans people – and yet the very same spaces are haunted by lingering corruptions. I question the coupling of stranger with danger, getting to the core of the specific flavour of trans fears in online community, from alt-right radicalisation to inter-community violence and how they’re mediated and made into metaphor by transgender artists.

Mars Nicolí (he/him, ze/hir) is a PhD candidate at Sheffield Hallam University with the research From Transsexual Transylvania: Transgender Perspectives on Horror Film and Television, and is part of the organization team for the horror conference Fear2000. He previously studied Film at the University of Roehampton, with a Master’s thesis on transmasculine voices on MPreg fanfictions in the Good Omens fandom.

He balances academic research with artistic output in many forms – currently co-running a queer speculative art anthology zine as part of the Fairies Collective, ze has also published prose and poetry in English and Italian, and hir short film Adam and Steve premiered in 2019 at the Weihnachtsfilmfestival in Berlin.

This event is free and donation-based

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