Bram E. Gieben, producer of Strange Exiles and co-editor of Revol Press talks to Kirsten Lee, Ph.D., an author and academic who specialises in social psychology. She gained her PH.D. at the University of South Florida, and now lives in Michigan. Kirsten is currently working on a book for Revol called Death and Things: The Existential Labor of Queer Objects, due out in 2027, in which she explores how the objects we collect, and associate with our identities, help us construct meaning. We discuss US politics, social class and culture, Judith Butler and gender identity, and Ernest Becker's cultural anthropology of death.
Kirsten’s research is informed by Marxist principles, looking at the ways in which class stratification drives division and dehumanisation. From here, she became interested in the study of art objects, feminist approaches to research, and queer theory. She began to draw some parallels between these approaches and ideas. She was first inspired by an exhibition called Trans/Clay/Body, curated by ceramic artist Dakota-Joan Parkinson, to look at how objects collected by those who identify as queer affected the formation of identity and meaning. You can read about the exhibition over at WUSF.
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