The Other Other Ginger Spice: Becoming a Creative Queer with Wigs, Friends, and Video in Post-Joh Queensland

This essay explores how music video aesthetics and remix practices shaped my creative and collaborative identity as a queer filmmaker, artist, and educator. In particular, I trace how my observation of remix, found footage, parody, and queer aesthetics in the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” and Pauline Pantsdown’s “I Don’t Like It” influenced me to continue exploring the creative potential of the music video form and to develop my own filmmaking practice. By tracing such links, I highlight how reflecting on such creative experiences and practices can offer insight into how we learn to think with, for and through screen and media works. In doing so, I argue that autoethnographic methods enable better understandings of how filmmaking, kinship-making, and identity formation processes might be thought of as co-constitutive. For me, reflecting on these formative experiences has brought a new appreciation for the significance of the music video form in my development as both a queer person and a creative practitioner; it was with and through music videos that I connected with peers and developed confidence in myself.<p></p>