College: Pembroke
Email: emw59@cam.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Amy Tobin
Research Topic: clothing | images | chemicals: covering the queer/butch/trans body (towards a trans | masc | aesthetics)
About
Evelyn is a researcher, writer and artist, currently completing a PhD in butch and transmasc aesthetics within the Centre for Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. Their research and artistic practice interrogates issues of queer/trans* representation within the politics of knowledge production, using critical and creative strategies such as parody to deflect normative epistemologies which foreclose marginalised forms of existence.
Evelyn has also worked with and led workshops for numerous arts organisations, including The Horse Hospital, Kettle’s Yard and Wysing Arts Centre, helping to redevelop and reimagine the role of creative practice as a mode of resistance and community building. Their critical and creative writing has been published in Another Gaze, Cambridge Literary Review, permeable barrier, b l u s h lit, with a short story forthcoming from Sticky Fingers Press as part of the ‘Dead Lovers’ series. Alongside this, Evelyn is also the host of ‘The Disenfranchised Things Talk Show,’ a monthly experimental radio show on No Bounds Radio which gives voice to queer outcast objects and their deviant dreamings.
Research
Using archival material alongside theoretical reflections, Evelyn’s thesis critically and creatively revisits selected artworks by UK-based queer and trans artists working at the close of the twentieth century to formulate a (proto-)transmasc aesthetics as a distinctive parodic and plastic representational strategy which enables the articulation of trans ambivalence apart from normative epistemologies of ‘realism.’ This strategy disrupts masculinity’s essential claim to universalism by revealing the centrality of masculinity’s effective plasticity to the emergence of ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ theoretical and bodily forms. The selected artists, in their re-styling of masculine bodies apart from essentialist morphologies, used diverse aesthetic strategies to negotiate the risks of revelling in a patriarchally-adjacent position when themselves occupying variously debased bodily forms. This thesis, by attending to such bodily stylings, also invigorates both queer/trans history and theory via the risks of re-assuming this same position, moving towards a post-identity framework to interrogate the politics, aesthetics and ethics of masculine-identified desire and its forms.
Scholarships/Prizes
2019-2023 OOC AHRC DTP Studentship, full scholarship in support of doctoral research
2019-2023 Honorary Vice Chancellor’s Award, for research excellence
2018-2019 AHRC DTP Studentship, full scholarship in support of MPhil study
2018 Tom Rosenthal Prize, for the most distinguished performance in a dissertation on any aspect of the Fine Arts in final examinations
2018 Peter de Somogyi Memorial Prize, for the most distinguished performance in an Arts subject
2017 Foundation Scholarship Award, for academic excellence
Fellowships
Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry, 2021-2023
Teaching
CS6: European Film, Department of Modern and Medieval Language and Linguistics,
University of Cambridge
‘Approaches to the History of Art, with reference to works of criticism,’ Department of History
of Art, University of Cambridge
Conference papers:
2021 In conversation with Posy Martin and Liv Proctor, director and producer of Keyboard Fantasies, documentary about the musician Glenn Copeland, The Horse Hospital, London.
2021 ‘Tactics for doing feminist work in the academy,’ panel discussion, Tactics and Praxis, University of Cambridge
2021 ‘‘An Aesthetics of Protection’: Screening the Queer Body from Harm,’ paper, Grassroots: Art Making and Political Struggle, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
2020 ‘Erotic ecologies: horizontality and be(holding) in Charlotte Prodger’s BRIDGIT [2016],’ paper, British Art and Natural Forces, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
2020 ‘Uncertain Grounds and Absent Figures: Reading Tina’s Keane’s Faded Wallpaper (1988) and Park McArthur with Constantina Zavitsanos’s ‘Sorta Like a Big Hug’ (2015),’ paper, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
2019 ‘Speaking with an oceanic body: vocal currents in Tina Keane’s A Shadow of a Journey [1979],’ paper, In Pursuit of Sound, University of Cambridge
Publications
2021 ‘The Labyrinth: Part One of a Fascinating Case of Intrigue, A Tale Most Mysterious!, Dead Lovers series: Anaïs Nin, Sticky Fingers Publishing (forthcoming)
2021 ‘Jade Montserrat’s Chronicle ia [2020]: care in the time of COVID-19,’ Another Gaze: Issue 5 (forthcoming)
2021 ‘Withdrawal, or: the artist formerly known as Lee Lozano has left the building,’ Cambridge Literary Review: Issue 13, Resistance
2020 ‘Desirous dreams: the feminist erotics of Rebecca Horn’s ‘Berlin–Exercises in Nine Parts’ (1974-5),’ Another Gaze: Issue 4
Other activities and roles
Co-convenor of the Queer Cultures Graduate Research Seminar, 2021-2022
Co-convenor of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Doctoral Researchers Network, 2020-2021
Personal website
