„A tornado flew around my room before you came” – black queer studies and querring black masculine
Starting off with Frank Ocean’s coming out story, author shows the limits of identity politics discourse. Referring to Siobhan B. Somerville’s theories, he discusses complicated intersections between race and sexuality and offers a brief history of their meaning.
Grounding his argument in the methodology gathered under the umbrella term of „black queer studies”, Stępniak presents E. Patrick Johnson’s theory about appropriating blackness. Uncovering heteronormative ideology standing behind the production of the „authentic blackness” discourse, he goes on to criticize the notions of patriarchal black masculinity. To illustrate his point, instead of reading „against the grain” of some straight cultural representations of black men, Stępniak offers an insight into two performance pieces by Afro-American homosexual theatre group, Pomo Afro Homos, and tries to show the process of performing black gay masculinity. He avoids essentialist stances though by insisting on the performative nature of the group’s work.

Queer Cinema: From cross-dressing to transgender films
The article offers a general view on queer in cinema, focusing on 1990s, and the New Queer Cinema, and selected transgender films. It addresses the issue of both gender and sexuality, in terms of queer theory and queer film studies. There is a short introduction to the history of representation of queer identity in cinema, including classical and genre films. Meanwhile it is a kind of popularization of fi lm analysis from the queer perspective, as the
one represented by Alexander Doty.
The next part of the article examine the tradition of recent queer cinema, including The New Queer Cinema and films of individual authors. It is shown that both in terms of its aesthetics and narration, queer cinema tends to re-imagine and re-create ways of representations, against the conventional fixed models of masculine and feminine, dictated by dominant orders and ideology. There are also two separate parts dedicated to the phenomena of
cross-dressing, and to transgender on screen.
Concluding, the article presents different aspects of the issue of queer cinema, exposing some of its common features, such as: an ironic self-awareness associated with post-modern representation; new conceptualization of self as transgender, transsexual, drag; crossings and transgressing of gender and/or sex boundaries, whether temporary or permanent, on the level of representation or anatomically.

Queer Theory and Polish cinema
There has never been the Polish version of “Gay Cinema” or “New Queer Cinema”. However, in the Polish movies one can easily trace numerous nonstandard characters, elements, and themes permeated with queer desire and rendered in queer aesthetics. They were simply ignored by the research community.
The notion of queer, which owes its theorization to Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and which is commonly defined as nonnormative expression of the sexual “strangers” beyond binary oppositions, has rapidly gained popularity in film studies. The researchers have begun to focus on neglected and/or censured unstable sexualities, on film characters’ construction, on authorial voice as manifested in the film, and on the different forms and
styles of reception. They have looked for queer codes of nonnormative sensibility in the movies of which the authors were or were not homosexuals.
Interpretation of two camp scenes from the movie Piętro wyżej (1937, dir. Leon Trystan) demonstrates that the tools which have been developed by queer theory appear helpful when applied to the Polish cinematic texts as well.

Gay and Lesbian Studies: Reactivation
My article encourages rethinking of LGBT studies legacy, a discipline which does not exist in the Polish university, yet it received a doubtful reputation. The popular narrative opposes contemporary lesbian and gay studies to queer theory – LGBT studies is claimed to be transhistorical, essentialist and anachronical. In my paper I argue that that approach is mistaken and I provide for positive arguments in favour of a critical return to the lesbian and gay scholarship. These four arguments are as following: interrelations with cultural studies; interest in sexuality and operations of the market; understanding and celebration of popular culture; creative tensions between LGBT studies and queer theory.

Ideas Lost in Time: LGBT Politics vs. Queer Theory and Practice in Poland and in the ‘West’
The text explores ways in which “Western” ideas of LGBT and queer politics travel and are nested in Poland. I am here particularly interested in the functioning of the notion of time. I claim that Polish LGBT activism cannot be simply categorised as “identitarian” or “queer,” because it exists in much different geo-temporality than that of “the West.” I focus on Campaign Against Homophobia, the largest and best-know Polish LGBT organisation. Their choice of strategies and discourses can be considered a certain queer mixture of ideas as represented through various historical stages of Western LGBT activism. I will explore reasons for this. Upon the emergence of LGBT activism in Poland in the 1990s, “Western” ideas were unanimously applied without much attempt at understanding their cultural and historical context. At one point in the Polish history, “Western time” simply took over, becoming a “universal time” for both the West and CEE. However, what is continuity from the Western perspective, here is a knotted and de-historicised cultural phenomenon – as much imposed as welcome – of which Polish LGBT activists and academics are trying to make sense. Thus, rather than repeating dominant discourses of CEE trying to “catch up with” Europe, I intend to look into much finer processes of  eaving and sawing geo-temporal realities into Polish LGBT activism.

O tym, jak piętnaścioro naukowców przeszło Mario w lewo

Review: Olbrzym w cieniu. Gry wideo w kulturze audiowizualnej, ed.: Andrzej Pitrus, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2012