Queer media temporalities

Abstract

This special issue of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media on “Queer Media Temporalities” draws upon this theoretical tradition and its rich set of concepts to explore queer temporalities that emerge within or may be generated by our engagement with time-based screen media. In its focus on specific media forms, it joins work by Kate Thomas and Jodi Taylor, who explore the intersections between queer time and the formal parameters that govern the time-based genres of poetry and music. Our questions here relate to both resistances and transformations enabled by the encounter of queer with (old and new) media temporalities. We are interested in the way games, television, video and experimental film enable or demand a queer renegotiation of time. Our contributors examine the role that archival temporalities play in the representation of queer lives in history and the imaginative landscapes of games. They consider whether reproductive futurism can help us to think about the queer life cycle of a television series and its characters. How does queer childhood, or “growing up sideways” (Stockton) resonate with film form for filmmakers invested in a nonreproductive queer genealogy? What is the relationship between media obsolescence and the “queer art of failure” (Halberstam, Art)?