The end of intimate politics in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 film The Lobster in relation to debates about intimate politics in contemporary queer scholarship and queer cinema studies. Rather than reading the film as a satire on compulsory coupling, this article teases out the film’s depiction of both normative and antinormative practices as parallel forms of sexual citizenship. Examining the relationship between normative enactments of gender and sexuality and the regulation of the species boundary, we argue that The Lobster reveals three dichotomies at the core of heteronormative cultural mythologies: male and female, coupled and uncoupled, human and nonhuman. In examining the complex interplay between these categories throughout The Lobster, this article foregrounds the important intersections between critical approaches to normativity established within feminist and queer film studies, and emergent approaches to nonhuman and more-than-human ethics in the environmental humanities.