Hello and welcome to Queer as Fiction, where we talk about the intersection between the queer and the historical in media.

I'm Jason. I'm Eli.

And today we're going to be talking about the 2002 novel, Finger Smith, and its 2016 film adaptation, The Handmaiden.

The content warnings for this episode are as follows. Sex, pornography, including exposure to minors, physical abuse, sexual assault, including mentions of bestiality, murder, specifically a stabbing, mental institutions, including abuse of patients, child abuse,

suicide and attempted suicide, one instance of swearing, torture, and the Japanese occupation

of Korea, colonialism and racism.

Before we start, we'd just like to note that we are recording in a new apartment that

Eli and I have just moved into, and so the sound quality

on this episode may be a little different to some of our previous episodes.

If it is worse, we apologize, and we will seek to improve that as we go forward.

So we have both read the novel and both seeing the film.

However, we did do this in a different order. Yes.

Eli, you read the novel first? I did. And then watched the film and I did the opposite.

And so I don't really know which one we're going to talk about first. I think we're probably

just going to talk about both of them. Yeah, we're just going to talk about a big mix-up.

It'll be fine. Yeah. So my first question is, I guess, which one did you prefer and what did you think about

them sort of generally? I don't think I have a simple answer to which one I prefer. I feel

like if you like average out how I feel, I prefer Finger Smith, the book,

but I feel like the movie had greater highs and lows.

So at its best, I think I liked the movie more.

But there were also parts of the movie where I was like,

nah, no, no, no, no, I don't want this.

...