Cultural Production and Legacies of Section 28

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* culture in 1980s Britain was largely a culture of print. Group formation and consolidation was enacted through the production and circulation of fliers, pamphlets and ephemeral texts, photography and other forms of image making, and film and video distribution. This panel explores how Section 28 was an attempt to choke this material culture, and the forms of personal and political identification it produced. Outside of the context of schooling, the aim of Section 28 was primarily to starve LGBT groups of local authority support and funding. This ideological assault on material resources, combined with the denigration of LGBT culture in social and political discourse, had a profound and highly uneven impact on artists, writers and cultural activists. Some retreated or fundamentally changed course in their work, expunging sexual or bodily content in fear of prosecution; for others, the assault of Section 28 provoked an efflorescence of production of new texts and images, the creation of new forms of group circulation, display, and community gathering. This roundtable will draw on contributors’ research expertise in queer lesbian feminist cultures of photography and pamphlet production, cultural and political activist responses to HIV/AIDS and contemporary queer and trans print cultures to consider the impact of Section 28. Discussing examples from our own research in conversation with wider participants at the conference, we envisage this roundtable as an opportunity for intergenerational sharing and reflection on how responses to Section 28 in print, image and art production, might inform contemporary struggles against state assault on trans people and persistent institutional racism and homophobia today.