Queer Bodies #4: Queer Erotica
Exploring Desire and Representation
- Date
- 16 April 2025
- Time
- 19:30 -21:30
- Location
- BG 3
- Room
- VOX-POP (ground floor)
On this evening, we are thrilled to welcome film scholars Jacob Engelberg and Sara Janssen, who will lead a conversation about queer erotics in cinema, its history, and its role in reshaping societal perceptions of desire. We will also be joined by Jessica van der Berg and hyeisoos, two members of the team that curate and organise the Porn Film Festival Amsterdam. With them, we’ll further explore the possibilities of building community through queer erotic fantasy.
It will be a dynamic evening with open dialogue, screening of a diverse range of videoclips, and a live poetry performance by Wietse Leenders.
Come and join us in this celebration of queer eroticism in all its forms.
This event is part of Queer Bodies, a programme series curated by writer, director, theatre- and filmmaker Tine Tabak. In their work, Tine explores the queer body as a source of knowledge and storytelling, merging art, philosophy, and literature. With Queer Bodies, they bring together artists and academics to deepen and make queer perspectives visible.
Dr. Jacob Engelberg is Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His work explores questions of social signification, knowledge, and desire in visual cultures. He has published research in the journal Porn Studies, in which he also edited a special issue around bisexuality and pornography. His first monograph, Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression, is forthcoming in 2026 with Duke University Press.
Sara Janssen works as a lecturer at the department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD focused on contemporary feminist and queer pornography as a form of cultural activism and she has previously published on feminist experimental film and queer documentary. She is currently working on a research project and podcast relating to sex-positive and sex-radical culture and activism in the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s.
Wietse Leenders is a writer of prose, audio and performance. He published in De Revisor, Extra Extra Magazine and more and was one of the residents for the DeBuren Paris residency in 2024. In 2025, he will perform Like a body, a landscape, a beat, a monologue combining poetry and environmental techno. He teaches at ArtEZ Arnhem and writes for De Theaterkrant.
hyeisoos (she/her) is an artist focusing on sexuality and care through post-porn. She has worked as a programmer at Filmhuis Cavia in Amsterdam, collaborating with diverse communities. She is a co-organiser of the Porn Film Festival Amsterdam and Climate Performer in South Korea.
Jessica van der Berg is a copywriter from Johannesburg, South Africa, now based in Amsterdam. A recent graduate of Sextech School, she has given talks on masturbation, vulvas, and ethical pornography, and is one of the organisers behind Porn Film Festival Amsterdam. Through her agency, After Dark, she works on marketing projects centred around sex, intimacy, and pleasure. She works to curate and contribute to safe spaces that dismantle shame. Jessica is a fierce advocate for the right to self-centred exploration - as an expression of both autonomy and intention.
