This is what I will be saying in presentation in this afternoon:

“Many people know from an early age that they are attracted to people of the same sex or don’t identify with their assigned gender at birth. Sexual attraction and gender questioning are not choices that can be changed voluntarily, but people do choose how they express their sexuality and gender identity and how much information they share with others.

Same-sex attracted, gender questioning and intersex people who experience discrimination, bullying and abuse are at higher risk of mental health problems than the wider population. This risk is greater if they do not have family and community support.

My project is a field trip to the RMIT’s City Campus’s Queer Lounge.

Queer Officer – The Queer Department – Student Representative – RMIT Student Union (RUSU). Advocate, support and represent Queer students at RMIT.

Queer Lounge – what is it? A safe place. This is a place of belonging. There are events held in the lounge: movie nights, workshops, crafternoons, collective meetings, whine and whine, afternoon tea and games night.

Why? Adrian asked us to do our project based on the things that we are passionate about, I followed his advice. I’m passionate about the Queer Department.

For this project, I had the following constraints:

• Filming for 5 seconds
• No full shots of the Queer Lounge + only parts of the lounge that make up the Queer Lounge

I’ve categorised my video clips into “areas” such as the hallway, study area, the kitchen area and the aesthetics of the lounge and within that, the colour palette and patterns of the videos, or at least I tried to.

How I filmed it:

• Point-of-View – A newbie entering the Queer Lounge who is exploring the things that make up the Queer Lounge.
• A lot of my collective members first experience in the Queer Lounge were scary. They were entering a room unknown to them. Foreign almost.
• When you are a newbie, you notice all the little things because you are more aware of your new surrounding.

I’m interested in Postic’s (2011 pp. 507) view that connections arise from the complex interchange between ways in which feminist and queer theory are informed through construction of terms related to sexual desire and pleasure. As well as Marinucci view of the construction of concepts of sexuality, sex and gender, by illustrating their emergence and presumed meanings, created as a result of historical and cultural developments.

For my next project, I plan to continue to work on the Queer Department Queer Lounge as the basis of my study. I am passionate about queer issues and I plan to explore this further. I plan to focus on sexuality, identity and queer feminism and the attitude changes toward sexuality issues through queer cinema. I’m interested in the interconnectedness of feminist and queer theory. How I’m going to relate this to my making of things will be something to think about in the next few weeks.

I will be reshooting a large number of videos, all my footage used for this project was raw footage, I didn’t edit the videos besides editing it to meet my five-second constraint”.

Hopefully, the presentation will go well. I’m more organised this time round, so I know this presentation will definitely be better than my last one.