09-02-2023
Nazmia Jamal is a part-time English Masters by Research
student at the University of South Wales, looking at queer lesbian feminisms in Britain, and working on various non-academic archival and publishing projects connected to this research.
Nazmia grew up in Aberdare, went to London in the late 1990s and returned to south Wales during the first Covid lockdown.
Now based in Cardiff, Nazmia co-runs the popular Lez Read book club and has a day job developing teacher training for the new Relationships & Sexuality Education curriculum in Wales.
My research focuses on a series of pamphlets called Lesbians Talk Issues that were published by Scarlet Press, a London based non-fiction feminist publishers, between 1992-1996.
The texts are an excellent archive that document a whole range of opinions and experiences that existed in lesbian communities in Britain at that time.
I was a teenager in the 1990s - I wrote fanzines, listened to riot grrrl bands and eventually found myself in London putting on gigs and going to workshops in queer squats – my introduction to feminism and to lesbian spaces came via a queer punk community.
In my research I am looking at how particular strands of queer lesbian feminism developed in Britain over this period.
I think the current culture wars around gender and sexuality are very difficult to unpick without a clear understanding of recent history.
Many of the loudest voices have been around for decades but as books go out of print and stories become forgotten or inaccessible in archives, we are in danger of forgetting that these arguments – e.g. who can be a woman, what defines being a lesbian, who is allowed in what spaces etc – have been going on, often amongst the same people, since the 1970s.
I think it is important for anyone who wants to have an opinion in the culture wars to have access to as much information as possible, I see my research as highlighting some of this knowledge and hopefully making it more easily accessible to more people.
Nazmia's supervisory team is Professor Emily Underwood-Lee, Professor Diana Wallace and Dr Rachel Lock-Lewis. For more information on postgraduate research degrees, visit our Graduate School website.
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