An essay on art, bodies and fascism.
In an era where identity politics is being weaponised against the very people it has sought to make visible, how can we reclaim complexity?
In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized modernist artworks. Named Entartete ‘Kunst’ – Degenerate ‘Art’ – it sought to define degeneracy, display it and destroy it. This act of violent appropriation is one episode in a long and ongoing history of the erasure of queer and non-normative cultures.
A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing works against this erasure; it is a manifesto – a catalogue for an exhibition that could never take place. Drawing on work from dissident sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to South African artist Zanele Muholi, as well as a century of queer cinema from Sergei Eisenstein to Pedro Almodóvar, So Mayer creates an archive of resistance.
| Author / Publisher |
So Mayer / Peninsula Press |
| Dimensions | 16 x 11x 1.5 cm |
About So Mayer
So Mayer is a writer, bookseller, film curator, and organiser. In 2020, they published A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula Press), an essay on art, bodies and fascism. Their other books include film criticism such as Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015) and poetry such as jacked a kaddish (Litmus Publishing, 2018), as well as contributions to anthologies such as Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota, 2018), At the Pond (Daunt, 2019) and On Relationships (3 of Cups, 2020). So works with queer feminist film curation collective Club des Femmes, and is a founder of Raising Films, a campaign and community for parents & carers in the UK screen sector.
Newly commissioned writing by So Mayer appears in DCA's newest publication Ghost Calls.
