Short Circuit

Abstract

Short Circuit Bishnupriya Ghosh (bio) Queer Cinema in the World By Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt Duke University Press, 2016 Long ago, there was VideoActive. Legendary in Silverlake, Los Angeles, which is a neighborhood known as the eastside LGBT counterpart to West Hollywood, VideoActive offered pleasures in LGBT cinema and gay porn, in international art cinema and cult classics. On my frequent jaunts to the store in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I found its curatorial creativity arousing in more ways than one. Collections titled "Antonioni" and "Herzog" rubbed shoulders with "Trashy Women" and "Teen Dilemma," while "Straight" sexual pleasures had their own niche and ceased to be the norm. Here was an encounter with "queer cinema" at the cusp of its emergence in media studies as a critical category (roughly dating to 1992). While VideoActive targeted LGBTQ consumers, in the adjacent Los Feliz neighborhood, Jerry's Video sported an eclectic selection of international cinema that included popular genres such as martial arts films that, at the time, had cult status. Cinephiles haunted both, thumbing videos, cruising whoever was around the corner shelf, surreptitiously peeping at what others were renting. At Jerry's Video, I encountered Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues (1986), a delightful feminist martial arts romp in which a general's daughter saves Chinese democracy from dictatorship. Played by the sassy Brigitte Lim, the butch character that enthralled, those erotic energies were inextricable from a fascination with Tsui Hark. This was well before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) mainstreamed the martial arts genre in the United States. In the video store worlds, queer affects threaded bodies, looks, screens, and images, racing rhizomatically through established cine-cultures and emergent formations. [End Page 200] It is such circuitries, not to be found in canonizing accounts of LGBT, art, or international cinema, that are the subject of Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt's magisterial volume, Queer Cinema in the World (2016). The authors accomplish this expansion through their sustained theoretical engagement with "queer" and "world" as critical categories, which then define what one includes under "queer cinema." Queerness, they argue, is an inhabitation of the world: a disturbance of sexual norms that has world-making capacities. Queer cinema, then, is not an abstract category with its constitutive features but a part of larger queer public cultures. Therefore, a book such as this entails site-specific research into queer public cultures of production, distribution, and reception. Such situated study not only maintains the "active, incomplete, and contestatory" qualities of queerness in the cinematic domain but also ensures there is no one enunciation of queerness. When the research is as multisited as it is in this volume, it puts pressure on any normative or prescriptive articulation of queer; in this sense, the book commits to the axiomatic that queers are different everywhere. The "world" that appears in and around queer cinema is both cultural and social, as the analytic "life-world" suggests, as well as phenomenological and affective. This is why I began with a personal jaunt to now-vanished neighborhood video stores. My point is less nostalgic recuperation than an attempt to invoke through example the situated immersion of queer cinema. Embedded in larger queer public culture, VideoActive in Silverlake and Jerry's Video in Los Feliz were apiece with an eastside queer "world" in which one attended unadvertised screenings of Todd Haynes's banned Super-star (1987) or Reza Abdoh's experimental Bogeyman (1991) and where Mr. Dan at VideoActive transformed into Gina Lotrimin at the riotously joyful nightclub Dragstrip 66. Schoonover and Galt signal the disturbance theater of such worlds, of sexual pleasures and of living precariously, that remain foundational to queerness. And, of course, their focus is on the constitutive role of queer cinema in materializing those worlds. Yet they also attend to the travels of queer pleasures across contexts. Here, the world indicates, in Edward Said's sense of worldliness, connections across historical particulars: the world is a window beyond the situated frame. One of the great achievements of the book is a refusal to privilege granular, context-specific expressions of queerness [End Page 201] over those that circulate through global distribution and exhibition of queer...