Nuns have a presence in cinema as longstanding as the medium itself, including the 1922 horror film Haxan. 2021’s Benedetta, a controversial but successful Paul Verhoeven film, is a recent restatement of the capacity for stories about women religious, or women in vocation normally called nuns, to be the source of powerful and successful works across all conceivable genres.

Trans- is powerful: attaching itself to concepts, it challenges supposedly settled knowledge about the world we live in. In FORUM’s 34th issue, this destabilisation becomes central. We draw attention to the importance the prefix ‘trans-’ has acquired in recent decades as an index of movement, crossing, and shifting – and we are interested in your approaches to all that trans- has to offer, as both description and method: transnationality, translation, transdisciplinary, transgender…