“Show Yourself” – queer Sámi sensibilities in contemporary cinema

About the seminar

This talk is a journey through my research project about queer Sámi sensibilities in contemporary cinema and media, and the ways in which the trauma of settler colonialism, including the traumatic repression of gender and sexual diversity, haunts the popular imagination. I will propose that queer Indigenous theories can expand our understanding of gender and sexuality overall through notions of (non)sovereign erotics, non-human kinship, and desire. These concepts are mobilized through analysis of two film examples, the immensely popular animated children film Frozen II (2019), produced in collaboration with a board of Sámi experts, and the Swedish fantasy-horror-romance movie Border (Gräns, 2018), about two trolls passing as humans, falling in love, and reckoning with a past and present of persecution. While these films may not necessarily appear to be about queer, trans, Indigeneous or Sámi themes at the first glance, hopefully by the end of talk, they will appear so to you, as they have come to appear to me.

About the presenter

Dr. Kata Kyrölä is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at the department of Culture, Communication and Media, University College London, and Docent in Gender Studies and Media Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Their most recent research explores queer Indigenous and Sámi sensibilities in contemporary media, and notions of safety and ‘cancel culture’ in queer, trans and feminist online spaces. Their publications include The Weight of Images: Affect, Body Image and Fat in the Media (2014), The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-racist Media Cultures (2018, co-editor), a special issue on Nordic queer cinema (2021, co-editor) for lambda nordica and articles in journals such as Gender and Education, Feminist Theory, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Sexualities and Social Media + Society.