Past event
QueerTales: women's lives reenacted Pay as you can
Inspired by feminist and queer efforts, Queer Tales will showcase stories that interrogate dominant narratives on women and their diversity.
In these complex modern days, we still find ourselves in the urgency of routes that keep battling gender inequality or discrimination, and that contribute to the “better world” we have hoped to live in. Academia and cultural production may have progressed over the last 40 years on how the woman's self is embraced. However, it is still important to ask ourselves the extent to which all this has been expanded to less or non-academic spaces and collective practices, or to communities where gender is not the only source of tension.
This event offers the general public an audiovisual output and a series of short performances that focus on women's queer experiences that have been informed by the community of St Andrews and which have been creatively co-led by the Colombian actor, producer and acting tutor, Silvia Santamaría, the Colombian scholar Paula Barreiro, and the 2025-2026 Performing Arts Officer of St Andrews Students' Association and President of the Mermaid Performing Arts Fund, Bella Hirst.
The event will conclude in conversation with Latin American scholar, Dr Karol Valderrama-Burgos of the School of Modern Languages, and a Q&A with acting coaches and performers. The overall event, hosted by artist Mary Delphine Freedman, will also be accompanied by a small exhibition comprising selected work from preliminary workshop sessions by the perfomers.
This event is part of a larger EDI project that Karol has developed with students Ciara Rooney, School President for Modern Languages, and Emily Hadfield, Spanish Student Convenor. This has also been made possible by our generous suppporters and their commitment to our community and professional development, such as the School of Modern Languages, the Students' Association, the Centre for Amerindian, Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CAS), the EDI Project Fund, and the Embassy of Colombia to the United Kingdom.