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A radical reframing of shame as a vital impetus of queer feminist activismShame has often been considered a threat to democratic politics, and was used to degrade and debase sex radicals and political marginals. But certain forms of shame were also embraced by 19th-century activists in an attempt to reverse entrenched power dynamics. Bogdan Popa brings together Rancière's techniques of disrupting inequality with a queer curiosity in the performativity of shame to show how 19th-century activists denaturalised conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender. This study fills a glaring absence in political theory by undertaking a genealogy of radical queer interventions that predate the 20th century

Abstract
A growing body of work has investigated the travel of neo-Marxist theorists and theory to state socialist contexts such as Romania and China, but this scholarship has not focused on successful strategies of indigenization. While several explanations for this process have been proposed, this article advances the concept of "ideological fit" to illuminate how a new body of work is successfully popularized and integrated into national conversations. I explore the relationship between the indigenization of Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory in Romania within the context of Cold War ideological conflict. This study compares the popularization strategies of a group of U.S. social scientists (Daniel Chirot and Katherine Verdery) with local attempts (Ilie Bădescu) to promote Wallerstein's theory in Romanian academia. World-systems theory advanced a critique of global capitalism in the United States, whereas in Romania, it was integrated into and discussed as a contribution to anticolonial struggles around the world. As a result, Bădescu's assertion that Romanian national poet Mihai Eminescu was an anticolonial thinker became generative in local sociology. I conclude by discussing how key theoretical elements of Wallerstein's theory, which I call the "leftovers," have been redeployed in new scholarship on decolonization and discuss the risks of such an approach.

Scholars of Romanian cinema (Parvulescu & Turcuș 2021) explored the topic of nostalgia in post-socialism, but they stopped short of analyzing why directors such as Radu Jude refuse to draw on a melancholic view of the past. Similarly, film critics (Gorzo & Lazăr 2022a; Ferencz-Flatz 2017) analyzed the importance of the Jude's attunement to contemporary cultural forms, but they did not engage with his reluctance to discuss positive aspects of Romanian state socialism. By putting two apparent opposite readings of Radu Jude's films in conversation, this article investigates Jude's philosophical technique which I conceptualize as "the construction of a dialectical image". I draw on films such as I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians (2018), Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) and the short film The Potemkinists (2021) to distinguish between a dialectical and a nostalgic use of the socialist past. I concentrate on three main topics: Jude's interest in capturing the materiality of the present, which he borrows from Siegfried Kracauer's cinematic materialism; the differences between Walter Benjamin's dialectics and Jude's cinema; and the use of comedy in The Potemkinists. My article adds to previous work on Jude's cinema (Parvulescu & Turcuș 2021; Gorzo & Lazăr 2022; Ferencz-Flatz 2018) a discussion about the uses of nostalgia in Romanian film, a subject that has not been discussed in relation to experimental and avantgarde productions.

This article offers a discussion of the aesthetics of realism, which represents a central analytic category in post-socialist debates about Romanian cinema. While many disagreements have concentrated on realism as a technique for either documenting reality or disenchantment, I deploy realism as a dialectical method to understand the work of a pioneer of Romanian cinema, Jean Mihail. In criticising current models of realism, I draw on Georg Lukács' Marxist theory to argue that realism offers not only a strong account of historical changes but also that it provides the basis of an anti-capitalist critique. Because a materialist method can illuminate shifts in film aesthetics in their social context, I concentrate on Mihail's evolution from his 1925 social realist film Manasse (Romania) to his corporatist works at the end of the 1930s to his 1949 socialist realist documentary Orașul nu doarme niciodată [The City That Never Sleeps] (Romania). Also, I argue that realism goes beyond rethinking cinema as a technique of defamiliarisation by insisting on the de-alienating effects of cinema. In contrast to recent reformulations of realism (Christian Ferencz-Flatz) inspired by Walter Benjamin, I show that Mihail's films constitute an important starting point to rethink a socially conscious realism.

In this article, I reinterpret the Romanian film The Valley Resounds ( Răsună valea, Călinescu 1949) to challenge reductive explanations of Stalinist art as totalitarian and suggest a novel use of socialist artworks in the era of digital capitalism. In advancing a practice of decontextualization, I claim that Marxist films need to be reinscribed in new art contexts so that they could generate utopian desires about sexuality and radical politics. Given that socialist realist productions function not unlike José Esteban Muñoz's queer practices of dis-identification, I argue that Stalinist films offer an archive that calls for the abolition of capitalist sex roles.

This book historicises Anglo-American queer theory by excavating a rival epistemology that advanced a communist sexuality during the Cold War. It proposes a new dialectical theory that inserts socialist ideas and films in the epistemology of queer studies

This book historicises Anglo-American queer theory by excavating a rival epistemology that advanced a communist sexuality during the Cold War. It proposes a new dialectical theory that inserts socialist ideas and films in the epistemology of queer studies.

"Decolonial Queer Politics and LGBTI+ Activism in Romania and Turkey" published on by Oxford University Press.

This book elucidates the socio-political and symbolic-cultural aspects of football as a "different form of politics" in Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe, drawing on both contemporary and historical aspects and including insights from different disciplines.