Next episode is the 200th, therefore this is the 199th. I raid the 66-page documents of ideas for episodes, that I have been keeping for nearly a decade, and present to you 199 ideas that I have not yet made into podcasts (except for this one).
Read moreAllusionist 198: Queer Arab Glossary
Since 2019, Marwan Kaabour has been collecting Arabic slang words used by and about queer people, first for the online community Takweer, and now the newly published Queer Arab Glossary. "When researching for this book, I discovered so much of the sociopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and historical layers that make up the words," he says. He also discovered quite a lot about frying, white beans and worms (metaphorical ones).
Read morePride playlist
Hello! Hereās a playlist of episodes of the show that are good to listen to for Pride month, but also at any time, because they are some of the most interesting and complex language matters that Iāve covered in the show:
Many Ways At Once. The Scots language didnāt have much of an LGBTQ+ lexicon. So writer and performer Dr Harry Josephine Giles decided to create one.
Polari was a secret language that was used mostly by gay men in London. And now lives on in the non-secret lexicon - you might not realise that you know some Polari words!
Two Or More is about the bumpy life of the word ābisexualā, describing things from oysters to space stations to God to hats and then people, where things get really complicated.
Parents is about how some of the vocabulary of pregnancy and parenting might not fit when youāre trans, and how to make the language gender-additive.
Rainbow Washing examines the trends in corporate performative allyship, and considers how to sort the real queer support from the harm-disguise.
Similarly, Queerbaiting follows a term from entrapment to marketing to the failures of onscreen representation.
Name Changers features listeners telling the stories of why they changed their names - often a big feature of a gender journey.
Thereās so much more to say about the word Queer, where it has been and where it is going now.
Survival: Bequest is about the MÄori word ātakatapuiā, a bit of linguistic evidence that prior to the European colonisation that imposed cisgender monogamous heterosexuality, MÄori culture had included myriad sexual orientations, gender fluidity and polyamory.
Survival: Today Tomorrow part 2 is about how new queer words are coined for the Icelandic language.
No Title is about making language gender-free. And there are unbeatable arguments to fell anyone who denies singular ātheyā, should you need those in your arsenal.
Joins is about how the available vocabulary for body parts can be a liability when youāre trans and/or non binary.
Aro Ace is about how newish words like āaromanticā and āasexualā enable people to voice their identities, and to find each other.
Pride, about why the word āPrideā was chosen to be the banner word for demonstrations and celebrations of LGBTQIA rights and culture.
And if you just need to shut off your internal monologue for a bit, you can replace it with a relaxingly scored list of gay animals.
Tranquillusionist: Gay Animals
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say a load of words which arenāt really about anything, so that your brain gets a little gentle diversion from thinking and/or feeling. Today: a list of gay animals.
Read moreAllusionist 157. Queerbaiting
The term 'queerbaiting' has evolved from meaning entrapment to marketing ploy to drawing "queer audiences into a piece of media that has no intention of actually meaningfully exploring queerness" says Leigh Pfeffer, host and producer of the podcast History Is Gay. Leigh tracks where the word's various incarnations came from, and why it should not be confused with 'queer coding'
Read moreAllusionist 147. Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 2
"It's really good if we can get the changes through here - that can be an inspiration for other other countries or other places in the world," says Ćorbjƶrg ĆorvaldsdĆ³ttir, chair of Samtƶkin ā78, the national queer organization of Iceland. In 2019, Iceland passed the Gender Autonomy Act, which added an option for people to register their official gender as X; with it, the country's strictly binary-gendered naming laws were suddenly transformed. Other changes, like a new genderfree pronoun, are catching on; but overhauling a whole grammatically gendered language is no easy undertaking.
Read moreAllusionist 144. Aro Ace
The word 'asexual' has been used by humans describing themselves for several decades; 'aromantic' is newer. Both words enable people to voice identities that were unacknowledged for centuries, to find each other and build communities together, and to provide counternarratives to what the allosexuals are pushing.
Read moreAllusionist 118. Survival: Bequest
When the Europeans arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as guns, stoats and Christianity, they brought ideas of cisgender monogamous heterosexuality that were imposed upon the MÄori people as if there had never been anything else. But one word, takatÄpui, proved otherwise.
Read moreAllusionist 117. Many Ways At Once
The Scots language didnāt have much of an LGBTQ+ lexicon. So writer and performer Dr Harry Josephine Giles decided to create one.
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