“We couldn’t really decide on costumes, so we decided to do it in the nude,” Barbara Hammer said jokingly of her short film “Double Strength,” shown on Monday night at a screening of eight of Hammer’s short films hosted by LGBT Studies. “Double Strength” is a lyrical exploration through photograph and nude trapeze performance of Hammer’s relationship with Terry Sendgraf, an artist and ex-lover. Nudity, of course, is actually integral to the meaning of the film, and is central to Hammer’s queer aesthetic. Hammer complained that in the culture of mainstream film, “We do not celebrate kinesthetics. We do not celebrate the body in cinema. We do not celebrate the lesbian body.” But this sort of levity, which rests on the surface of deep exploration and rigorous aesthetic thought, is characteristic of Hammer’s work. She describes her first film, “Dyketactics,” produced in 1974, as something of a “lesbian commercial.” And the film is conscious of itself as such — pairing images of naked women hugging trees with a Lavender Jane song with the lyrics “there’s no penis between us” — but it is also an incredibly transgressive staging of active and naturalized female sexuality. Other highlights included “Menses,” a farcical exploration of myths about menstruation, “Multiple Orgasms,” a silent film in which footage of caves and rock strata is layered over a vagina experiencing multiple orgasms, and “No No Nooky TV,” in which Hammer uses digital patterns and dirty words typed on an Amiga computer to explore the relation between technology, sexuality, feminism and self-creation. Hammer herself, gray-haired and spry, was perhaps the greatest highlight of the evening. She has lived the life of the women’s movement in this country (she didn’t hear the word “lesbian” until she was 30, after which she came out instantly) and had much advice to offer the audience about how to powerfully organize around identity. She is currently working on a film entitled “Bolex Dykes,” a mentorship project on which she is collaborating with a young San Francisco-based lesbian filmmaker.