Mia Jones

Substack • 7th August 2025

Dancers, Morals, Queens: Policing the Gender Non-Conforming Body on Stage.

Like drag, pantomime subverted gender and social norms in an incredibly public way, and both have had their existences threatened by men in positions of power on ‘moral’ grounds. But what, exactly, is the point of comparing them both? What has a dance often performed as a sort of ‘half-time’ show during gladiator fights got to do with RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars, or Drag Brunch, or Madonna’s Vogue? The point is questioning why public gender non-conforming bodies have been such a point of debate for over two millennia. Simply, why have people cared so much? And why have they never succeeded in actually doing anything permanent about it?

Substack • 19th July 2025

How to Survive a London Summer

It’s summer, it’s London, it’s 32 degrees and every single London influencer is heading to Notting Hill to get a matcha, browse vintage jewellery, and eat their M&S picky bits picnic in Hyde Park. They’ve posted a compilation of their fabulous London day on their TikTok to the sound of Lily Allen’s LDN. You want in on that. You want a London summer.

Substack • 16th June 2025

‘Recessioncore’, Indie Sleaze, and Life in a Post-Brat Society.

A few months ago I was hungover on the Avanti West Coast to Liverpool Lime Street. I was the type of hungover where I try to reinvent myself, trying to draw a veil over what had happened the night before. Sitting there, all philosophical, with a pounding headache and half an M&S sandwich (which had set me back a fiver, by the way) in my hand, I considered my fellow passengers. A group of girls were sitting across the aisle, donning low waisted skinny jeans with skirts over the top in a way that would make red-carpet bound Ashley Tisdale jealous. I opened TikTok, scrolled for a few minutes, liked a video of a penguin, and I saw it: recessioncore.

Substack • 2nd June 2025

Virginia Woolf and Disillusionment (Jacob’s Room, Voice, and Anti-Nationalism)

Archer’s first two enunciations of Jacob’s name are separated from the rest of the text, a stylistic choice from Woolf (as she held significant stylistic control over the printing of her work through her own Hogarth Press). The cries, therefore, are left hanging, waiting for an answer. The blank spaces on the pages reflect the sound of Archer’s voice drowning out across the Cornish seaside. The blank spaces are, like Jacob, completely silent, responding to his name with nothing but absence.

Substack • 25th May 2025

Food and Identity (Nara Smith, Ozempic, and Bacon Sandwiches)

You’re scrolling on your For You page, and you land on a video of someone unpacking their ‘Erewhon haul’, their nails are perfectly manicured, invisible roots, they’ve bought sea moss for $50. Their tote bag full of organic goods fits in seamlessly into their image of glamour. You wonder, would you consider your weekly shop a haul? When does food become an accessory to a calculated persona?

Substack • 18th March 2025

First Responders: Right-Wing Keyboard Warriors and the Weaponisation of Tragedy in the UK.

Like many of us, my first port of call when I think something has happened is social media. News spreads fast and wide on sites like X before the reporters at the BBC or the Standard have managed to get their ‘scoop’ out there. A witness will tweet a sentence, a friend of a friend will ask what’s going on, a passerby will share a photo of some paramedics, some blue tape, a tarp on the floor.

Substack • 27th February 2025

The ‘Alpha-Male’ Epidemic, Male Violence, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth

One second you’re learning about iambic pentameter with a boy in your class, the next he’s sharing podcast clips on his Instagram story of men talking about how women need to be controlled, Taming of the Shrew style. These ideals are horrifyingly archaic, and are often played with in Shakespeare’s work.

Substack • 13th February 2025

Gender Identity and Empire: Reading Woolf’s Orlando in the Era of Trump.

From the invention of the concept, the nature of the empire is to police. To police who ‘counts’ as a citizen, to police self expression, to control. Empire uses gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, education, and almost every other tiny detail that makes up an identity to create hierarchy: in the wise words of Charli xcx, ‘you wanna know what I’ve got going on down there?’

STRAND Magazine • 4th February 2025

TL;DR True Love Is Real When You’re Not Overstimulated

Recently, I’ve found myself forgetting the walk from the library to campus, unable to recall the faces of those around me on the Northern line that morning. By putting on my noise-cancelling headphones, at just the right level to drown out the screeching between Camden Town and Euston, I could block myself away from the outside world. Muscle memory would guide me from A to B, until it got to a point where I hadn’t mustered a single independent thought in what felt like weeks.

Substack • 23rd January 2025

Observations on East Pediment L and M.

(Audio description available) Tell me, O Muse, about a mother and a daughter, tell me about their journey into creation, and how they oversaw the city of Athens from their rooftop, and where they went when their duty of overlooking was taken away. Tell me about their Odyssey over the seas, and where they ended up. Tell me, O Muse, about their journey from the workshop, to the Parthenon, to the long, crowded hall. Find the beginning.

STRAND Magazine • 19th January 2024

Hiraeth: an Elegy for Forgotten Words.

Ferdinand de Saussure brings forward the hypothesis that a word requires a signifier (a physical appearance, a word, image, or sound) and a signified (a concept) to create meaning. Therefore if the signifier and signified are codependent to create meaning, meaning cannot exist without one or the other. A question was brought up in a seminar I attended in my first year on Saussure and it has been on my mind since: if a language does not have a word for feelings such as love and friendship (that i...

STRAND Magazine • 31st October 2023

‘Neither and Both’: the Gender-Queer Body in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Gender-queer bodies, while seeming like a hot topic among politicians in recent weeks, have never been a modern invention. Although the term itself originated in the 1990s, humans that fit under the wide gender-queer or transgender umbrella have existed for a millennia. A 5000-year-old biologically male skeleton found dressed in feminine clothing surrounded by traditionally feminine grave-goods in Prague, the 4000 year history of Eunuchs (sometimes referred to as a third gender according to Wang...