Dr. Randal Rogers is an associate professor in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance where he teaches visual studies in the areas of Creative Technologies and interdisciplinary graduate studies. His research includes projects on: nationalism and race at universal exhibitions; blood in visual culture; Dexter and reproductive futurism; drugs, bipolarity and affect in Homeland; and most recently queer nostalgia in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He has also edited an essay collection (with Christine Ramsay) about Saskatchewan history and culture titled Overlooking Saskatchewan: Minding the Gap and is currently working on a book titled Into a Wilderness of Mirrors: Spies and Queer Subjects in Visual Culture.

Into a Wilderness of Mirrors:  Spies and Queer Subjects in Visual Culture.

With reputed opaque, ambiguous, untrustworthy and hyper-vigilant character, where secrecy, lying, deflection, manipulation, duplicity and a penchant for sabotage and treason meet, there has existed a surprising rhetorical proximity between spies and queer subjects in history and popular culture. The most well-known examples are Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt of the infamous Cambridge Five spies in the 1930s. Yet, visual culture is replete with queer spies across its history.  This research asks simply: Why? By examining the history of film and television this project theorizes the relationship through the major trait that spies and queer subjects have been thought to share — double agency.