Queer Masculinities

Join writers, academics and creatives Finn Mackay, Avi Ben-Zeev and Kenya Sterling for a wide-ranging conversation on the shifting, plural and often contested terrain of queer masculinities.

What does queer masculinity look like when it refuses to be fixed, legible, or singular? When it is found, in a new generation, in unexpected forms and places? 

Coming from differing perspectives and experiences of the masculine, they will explore how masculinity is constructed, policed and reimagined, and how queer, trans and butch lesbian lives disrupt these structures in everyday, embodied ways. 

Chaired by Nick McGlynn, whose research explores sexuality, intimacy and queer cultures, the panel asks how we speak about, and celebrate, masculinity without reducing it to stereotype or stability.

Finn Mackay is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England in Bristol and the author of two books: Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars published by Bloomsbury, and Radical Feminism published by Palgrave. They write frequently for the mainstream press including comment and reviews in The Guardian and do media and public events on LGBTQI+ rights and feminism. Finn’s background is in policy and training for the women’s sector and in education, as well as within activism, founding the London Feminist Network in 2004 and reviving the London Reclaim the Night march against sexual harassment and all forms of sexualised male violence against women. 

Avi Ben-Zeev (he/him) is a London-based gay trans man, high school failure, and Yale PhD. As a writer, psychologist, and immigrant, he explores the challenges and freedoms of journeying toward belonging and home. Avi’s stories won the 2024 London Independent Story Prize (LISP) and the UK’s first transgender writing competition. He was shortlisted and highly commended by the 2023 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, and his co-edited anthology, Trans Homo, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Avi’s literary memoir, Calling My Deadname Home, was published by Muswell Press and longlisted for the 2025 Polari Literary Prize.

Kenya Sterling (he/they) is a queer working class creative and writer. His multidisciplinary work spans across performance, writing, and visual art. Kenya enjoys exploring masculinity, working class identity, transness, and blackness; often looked at through a surrealist lense. Credits include; The Belt of Venus (writer), I Can See the Sun but | Can’t Feel it Yet (narrator). Most recently Kenya received the Tony Craze’s Highly Commended award for their play The Threat of a Storm.

Nick McGlynn (he/him) is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Brighton focused on the geographies of LGBTQ+ equalities. Since 2018 he has been researching the GBQ men’s Bear community, particularly in the UK and the USA. Nick is the author of Bodies & Boundaries of UK Bear Spaces – the first academic book dedicated entirely to Bears. His research challenges the idea that Bears are driven by patriarchal masculinities, and stresses the importance of engaging with the materiality of GBQ men’s bodies. Most recently Nick has partnered with a community oral history project — Bear History Project International — to explore the presence of gendered, racialised, and corporeal tensions in early Bear culture.