What You Love: The Library at Alexandria, Quotation, and Survival

The figure of Sappho is paradigmatic of the queer-feminist archive: she is the founding figure of female artistic genius and sexual deviance in Western Civilization, yet neither her work nor her story has survived. Between 1896 and 1931 over twenty cinematic versions of Sappho were produce for the screen, making it one of the most ubiquitous texts of the silent film era. Yet this once wildly popular and frequently re-made text has been all but erased from cinema history. How might we reimagine the parameters of cinema and media history and theory by reimagining and remaking the parameters of the archive? Drawing examples from What You Love, an archive of contemporary queer feelings produced in residency at The Huntington Library in Los Angeles, this presentation will rethink the history of cinema and sexuality, questioning contemporary conceptions of romantic love, the loss of queer female voices from the historical imagination, and the parameters of the archive.

Kiki Loveday is a PhD student in Film and Digital Media. She is an experimental filmmaker obsessed with deconstructing (and reconstructing) cinematic conventions: rethinking genre, mixing mediums, and practicing alternative production paradigms. Much of her work is concerned with isolation, people’s sometimes silly and heartbreaking inability to fit-in, connect with each other, or figure out how to live in a culture they didn’t create.

Friday Forum is a weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for sharing graduate research across the humanities. Join us for light refreshments and weekly presentations by your fellow graduate students. Friday Forum is supported by the Graduate Student Association, the Humanities Institute, and the following departments: HAVC, Literature, and History of Consciousness.