The countdown is on to the official launch of PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival 2022 and to Archer’s panel on queer aesthetics and self expression!

My facial hair, body weight, loud voice, or my instinct to fight do not define my gender. I am not just a gender. 

The way I moved my body was the one thing I could control in a world that confused and bewildered me constantly.

Here’s a top 10 list of our editors’ picks for 2021, celebrating some of the incredible articles written by our contributors.

As we celebrate our newly launched DISABILITIES issue, we’re also taking the opportunity to look back on all of the brilliant pieces we’ve published this year. This was my first year as Archer Magazine’s Deputy Online Editor. As a long-time Archer volunteer and hanger-arounder of founder Amy Middleton, I was absolutely thrilled to come aboard. …

Play a high-G note on a piano and take a look around the room; you’ll see who the former emos are almost immediately. My Chemical Romance defined ‘emo’ as we know it. Prior to their astronomic rise in popularity, emo was loosely applied to almost any music that played on commercial radio or sat under …

Content warning: This article discusses transmisogyny and eating disorders.    “If you can see it, you can be it.” It’s a beautiful phrase, expressing how strong role models can be vital for the confidence and self-esteem of people from diverse backgrounds. We all love seeing people who look like us being strong and successful in …

In early June, I was preparing myself for the rainbow marketing and pink washing that comes with the celebration of Pride Month each year.  During this month, brands and organisations often come up with new logos and various types of rainbow branding. They host talks, plan shows, and make a sudden effort to ensure conversations …

It’s term four of year seven. Just a few weeks before summer holidays.  Our lunches sit in our up-turned summer hats like pretentious fruit bowls. Our uniform hems grazes our knees, as we sit with perfectly crossed legs.  My friend Victoria, who I’d known basically my whole life, slams down her tuck shop focaccia. She pauses …

I was deep into Melbourne’s second lockdown, writing an article on COVID’s impact on queer nightlife, when my editor showed me queeringthemap. The interactive tool allows users to geographically map queer memories and landmarks, recording “the cartography of queer life”. Sifting through notes pinned against Melbourne’s most recognisable fixtures was beautiful and haunting; a showcase …

Gender non-conformity is messy. If it’s neither male nor female, then what is it, everything? Nothing? A liminal space in-between? Somewhere on the spectrum, perhaps? The boundaries of a gender that does not conform are porous and exaltant. They adapt and emerge. We are not one; we contain multitudes. And, as paradoxical as this multiplicity …

Content warning: this article discusses depression.    In 2015, I forgot who I was. Like a reverse Wizard of Oz, the world suddenly went from vibrant colour to black and white. I felt as though there was a storm cloud behind my shoulder. Joy was being sucked out of my every move.  Depression wasn’t a …

Tarzan JungleQueen is a queer, non-binary, multidisciplinary artist based in Gulumoerrgin (Darwin), Northern Territory whose art practice straddles photography, graphic design, drawing, video, textual works, print making and everything in between. Their subject is themselves: distorted, caricatured, split and recompiled into an army of new configurations rallying warlike against the perils of a heterosexist and …

Pink is for girls. Blue for boys. It’s the colour cliché we’ve come to expect from children’s clothing. Layered on are gendered clothing prints and styles.

I imagine gender as an enormous structure. Human-made buildings of every kind of architecture, material, and colour imaginable – and unimaginable – sprawling across the landscape. I may be taking the concept of gender as a social construct a bit literally, but the metaphor helps me conceptualise it in all its forms: the binary and …

Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer and scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His second book of poetry, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, was longlisted for Canada …

Content warning: This article discusses transphobia and domestic and family violence.   I have been learning through voraciously consuming lived experience narratives and reflections on trans lives for years. I have remained alert to how trans identity is covered or erased in academia and research activity. Soaking up lived perspectives was part of my quest …

Content warning: This article discusses violence and suicidal ideation.   Having been involved in queer-led activist and organising circles for some time, I’m all too familiar with caring for people in crisis. I’ve watched as friends burn themselves to the ground caring for at-risk members of our communities, guiding them through addiction, homelessness, suicidal ideation, …

It looks reasonable in writing: the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards dictate that for a trans woman to have surgery, she needs two letters from two different mental health professionals. You might skim past that in text and not give it another thought. It might not sound like a big deal – …

This year has been hectic, to say the least. To round out the year that we’d rather forget, we have put together a top 10 list of our editors’ picks for 2020. You will see some of the excellent pieces published this year, the most-read pieces and our older favourites. Our online editor Roz Bellamy’s …

I am a male-presenting non-binary individual: I have stubble, body hair, a deep voice, a balding head. All of these align with society’s acceptable image of masculinity. However, I also wear makeup, which deviates from an acceptable form of masculinity. For me, wearing makeup in public gives me a lot of anxiety, though I’ve done …

As a child, I gravitated towards whatever connected with me on an emotional level. The first film I remember loving was High School Musical at around age nine. I only discovered the reputation the film had when I entered secondary school a few years later. At best, it was considered an embarrassing thing to like, …