Essential Information
| Type | Events and festivals |
|---|---|
| Location | |
| Date and Times | Sunday 10 September | 2pm-4pm CHANGE OF DATE |
| Prices | Free | 18+ |
Head to the National Maritime Museum for a night of creativity and crushing hard, as part of the Thames Pride Arts Festival.
In this special creative workshop, you will write and decorate love letters for long dead queer guys, says event host and artist and historian, Ema Sala.
You will be introduced to cute sailors and their stories, while reflecting on gender variance in the nineteenth century. Join Ema to look at examples of Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB) people sailing as men in the military and Merchant Navy.
Event programme
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Talk: Female sailors through a queer lens
Hear from Ema about their research on AFAB people sailing as men in the nineteenth century, transing gender and geographical boundaries at a time of fast-paced change in British culture.
These folks, which are known as “female sailors” both in modern scholarship and in the culture of their times, were popular figures, which featured prominently in the press, in fiction, and in balladry. They were often gazed upon under an erotic lens, that, although often subtly queer, mostly appealed to heteronormative sensibilities.
Ema's research invites you to look at the tradition of female sailors with a queer eye, as nonbinary/transmasculine ancestors and potential historical crushes, but also exploring the surprising ways in which nineteenth-century ideas on gender made space for things like gender variance.
In the workshop Ema will ask: can we reinvent the erotics on female sailors in a queer way, and reclaim crushing hard as a valid methodology to interact with the past?
Craft activity: Create your own queer love token
After the talk, you will get crafting. Ema will show you how to fold puzzle purse envelopes, a late eighteenth/nineteenth century technique of letter-locking where a love letter is folded like a purse, and unfolded to show little poems and images.
You will be using material like drawing ink, dip pens and quills to embody our inner lovelorn romantic.
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Puzzle purse envelopes have both a visual and a textual component, and you are welcome to write your own poem or to find one in historical material.
Ema will show you how text works in extant puzzle purses and sailor’s love tokens. Together you can read ballads about female sailors, sailors leaving tokens to their beloved, or simply sailors being cute.
You will also be inspired by the nineteenth century iconography of love by looking at extant examples of love letters. Or you can make something wholly original!
The only requirement of the workshop is to crush hard on someone and write them a queer love letter. At the end of the workshop you will have learned about female sailors and the surprising continued presence of transmasculine people in nautical history, and you will be able to fold out a love letter.
Event information
The event is welcome to anyone 18+. There is no explicit talk of sex, but it is hinted at, so use your best discretion.
Other triggers include mentions of people being outed, as well as corporal punishment and medicalised discourses on queerness.