In this issue, we celebrate the launch of our new multicultural, feminist film and tv podcast, What Goddeses Watch, with an issue devoted to the complexities of sound, tongue and meaning.

Poet Harry Josephine Styles discusses her new sci-fi romance, a unique adventure of queer love in a space station, written in the Orkney dialect. We talk non-English speaking composers and tender listenings with BBC radio music presenter Elizabeth Alker. British Bengali polymath musician, singer and AV artist Bishi discusses the idea of borderless identity and the challenge of turning the trauma of migration into euphoria. Artist Sarah-Jane Crowson imagines dreamlike conversations between feminists across continents, cultures and times, as they meet in bricolage cafes. And I offer a very partial and personal dictionary of leftover Bengali from my bilingual family. Perhaps it will reflect the experience for others in varying diasporic cultures. Perhaps it will only make sense to me.

The world can feel like a place of cacophony. We need to carve out chambers to stop, reflect and find our own meaning, and to make them with others. In this issue, we bring together all episodes so far of What Goddeses Watch, including pop punk icons Ezra Furman and Ms Mohammed on documentary Rebel Dykes and comedy F*cking With Nobody. Hear their discussion of queer activist clubbing and heteronormative sex fantasies.  Mona Eltahawy and Maaza Mengiste talk new Arab-African cinema and we look at actresses of colour in a Bond Girls Special.

As you’d hope, the podcast is wildly intellectual and naughty, a bit like a Cannes takeover by the cast of Pose and Audre Lorde. We want to feminise film and shift the intellectual hierarchies and the primacy of English-speaking stories, so we’ll be covering international films new and old, Hollywood classics and Netflix binges. Join us as founding members through Patreon https://www.patreon.com/whatgoddesseswatch , and you will get more bitesize episodes, plus the option to star as a Godex (as we call gender-inclusive Goddesses) in your own artwork by Sarah-Jane Crowson.

And if you’re feeling still feeling the Winter blues, Caiomhe Lavelle’s boldly bonkers DJ Mix of Goth disco delights will brighten up your mood, I promise. I’ve already played it twice this morning. Catch us at the What Goddeses Watch podcast, until the Deliciously Vile Frontiers issue buds forth in July.

Love at ya,

Soma

Main image: Sarah-Jane Crowson