Heavy Petting: Literary Lesbians and their Cats
To celebrate Lesbian Visibility Week, join Dr Hannah Roche from the University of York for an illustrated talk on queer women writers and their cats.
Though they come and go as they please, cats have made their presence felt in lesbian literature for more than a century. From the muse (or mews) of Amy Lowell's ‘Winky’ poems to Rita Mae Brown's feline-fuelled romps in Rubyfruit Jungle and In Her Day, cats have clawed their way into narratives of lesbian lives, deaths, and everything in between. As both chosen family members and models of fierce independence, cats have given lesbian writers new ways of understanding their bodies, their relationships, their histories, and their work.
Discussing the feline companions and characters of writers ranging from Radclyffe Hall to Alison Bechdel, and sharing the forgotten story of Norah C. James’s Tinkle the Cat, this talk will explore how and why the emphatically queer domestic cat continues to shape lesbian lives, homes, and books.
Illustration taken from Alison Bechdel, Spent: A Comic Novel (Jonathan Cape, 2025), page 75.
Hannah Roche is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of York. She is the author of The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (Columbia University Press, 2019) and co-editor, with Jana Funke, of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is currently co-leading a major project on 100 Years of The Well of Loneliness.
Organiser of Heavy Petting: Literary Lesbians and their Cats
This ticket grants access to Heavy Petting: Literary Lesbians and their Cats on Saturday 25th April 2026
This ticket grants access to Heavy Petting: Literary Lesbians and their Cats on Saturday 25th April 2026. Please pay what you can for this ticket, minimum £1.
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