Author: Raffia

The Power of Pornography: Behind-the-Scenes of the Porn Film Festival Amsterdam with Jessie van der Berg – Culturally Curious Ep.10

In this episode Nanette Ashby dives into the world of Porn Film Festivals together with organiser Jessica van der Berg. Originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, Jessie is a copywriter, Sextech School graduate, and speaker on masturbation, vulvas, and pornography. She is part of the team behind the Porn Film Festival Amsterdam. She is also the organiser of SONA, South Africa’s first Sex of the Nation Address – a sex-positive, consent-centered, post-porn festival and fundraiser for the sex worker movements Sweat and Sisonke.

The (im)possibilities of being a female scientist in Enlightenment Europe: how women navigated gender roles in eighteenth-century science

by Pia van de Schaft
As a consequence of the increased appreciation of empirical research, a new scientific culture emerged. Intellectuals collaborated in national scientific academies while amateurs gathered in scientific societies of their own. Especially in Western Europe, the growing interest generated pathways for some women to engage with the sciences.

Poem: Crushed birds

by Lola Riley
Kindness should be passed on and that’s how you should live your life so I took a long lunch and I haven’t taken my medication since Sunday.

Unattainable Desire: Queer Longing and Utopian Temporality in Woolf’s The Waves (1931)

by Serdzhan Ibryam Hasan
The Waves (1931) is widely regarded as one of Virginia Woolf’s most significant experimental modernist novels. Published in 1931, the novel traces the experiences of six characters, Bernard, Jinny, Louis, Neville, Rhoda, and Susan, from childhood to adulthood as they confront the death of their friend, Percival.

Durational Disability Aesthetics: Collective and Individual Memory of the Capitol Crawl in Gina Vernon’s All the Way to Freedom

by Marle Zwietering
In 1990, over sixty activists of disability rights organization ADAPT left their mobility aids at the bottom of the stairs of the United States Capitol. They then ascended the stairs in a protest now known as the Capitol Crawl.

Antisemitism in Roald Dahl’s The Witches

by Mila Polderman
Roald Dahl is perhaps one of the most famous children’s book writers, with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and Mathilda (1988) being just two examples of his successful works. Many of his books were also adapted into movies, one of the most recent being The Witches (2020).