Queer Cinema Research Articles

Extended Space as Disgrace: A Phenomenological Study of Rahat Khwaja’s Queerness in the Pakistani Movie Zindagi Tamasha

This phenomenological study reveals the societal backlash faced by Rahat Khwaja in the movie Zindagi Tamasha, highlighting broader implications for the acceptance of queer identities within Pakistan's socio-religious landscape. I, hereby, contend that Pakistan’s gender-based patriarchal society disregards and questions queerness, especially in religious personalities. Rationalising this study using Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenological model of affect as contact with Gillian Rose’s visual methodologies, I examine the conundrums of gender performance in the patriarchal Pakistani society by significantly focusing on how Khwaja's dance performance challenges normative gender roles and problematises societal backlash on becoming a queer-oriented religious person. Nonetheless, his newly acquired queerness as rejection of the norms highlights the socio-religious dilemma of his existence. This study reflects on the problem of queer phenomenological belongingness and unbelongingness of Khwaja as a disoriented figure in the hetero-obsessed patriarchal society and the resultant challenges he faces due to the backlash on his dance performance while asserting his identity as a righteous masculine man. Although he refuses to apologise, this extended space becomes disgraceful for him, and recreates his marginalised position as a fat-belly dancer. By examining the societal reaction to Khwaja's performance, I underscore the complexities of queer identity politics in contemporary Pakistan, shedding light on both the challenges and resilience of individuals navigating cultural norms for adjustment. Keywords: Queer Phenomenology, Zindagi Tamasha, viral queer memes, disgrace, socio-religious shaming culture; Pakistani queer cinema, Rahat Khwaja

Gender Role Reconstruction: LGBTQ+ Optimism in Mainland China Via Transgender Representation – Investigating Online Comments on Queer Films

Gender Role Reconstruction: LGBTQ+ Optimism in Mainland China Via Transgender Representation – Investigating Online Comments on Queer Films

Autoimmunities after COVID: An Interview with Cindy Patton

Cindy Patton is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. An early AIDS activist in Boston, she holds a PhD in Communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After inaugurating her academic career at Temple University (Rhetoric and Community) and Emory University (Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts), she accepted a Canada Research Chair in Community, Culture and Health at Simon Fraser (2003-15). In that capacity, she worked with more than two dozen groups to develop small community-driven projects related to HIV/AIDS, housing, social welfare, mental health, while achieving, culminating in the creation of the Community Health Online Digital Research Resource, a catalogued, open-access, full-text collection of the materials from those groups (www.chodarr.org). Her academic publications span the social study of medicine, especially AIDS; social movement theory; gender studies; and media studies. She is the coeditor of Queer Diasporas (2000) and a special issue of Cultural Studies on Pierre Bourdieu (2003). She is the author of such works as Globalizing AIDS (2002), Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film (1997), Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (1996), Inventing AIDS (1990), and LA Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand: A Queer Film Classic (2014). Taken collectively, Patton’s scholarship and activism has laid the foundation for insights in the health humanities, particularly AIDS studies, that consider the inextricable connections between epidemiology and ideology. Patton’s theorizations of stigma and discrimination patterns, her deconstruction of “truth” discourses subtending science, her critical re-evaluations of axioms associated with risk, safe sex, community, and knowledge production have been crucial interventions in the understanding of health and illness as cultural and discursive scripts. Among Patton’s most enduring contributions has been her theorization of how “African AIDS” was invented and circulated—that is, the notion of geographically bifurcated HIV pandemics split by the essential linkage between Africa and blackness generally with pathogenesis. Equally influential has been her elaboration of the insurgent queer research practices that fused with antiracist struggle to combat this split. In the interview below, Travis Alexander and Nishant Shahani engage Patton in a discussion on a range of topics—from (dis)continuities between the HIV/AIDS and COVID pandemics to the role of queer activism in forging epidemiological counter-publics and the geopolitics of medical bureaucracy.

Queer Cinema in Contemporary France: Five Directors by Todd W. Reeser (review)

Queer Cinema in Contemporary France: Five Directors by Todd W. Reeser (review)

Dreamers of the Day and the Living Archive of 1990s Lesbian Cinema in Canada

In this article we reflect on our experiences researching and curating a Canadian lesbian feature film, Dreamers of the Day (1990, dirs. Patricia Rivera Spencer and Philip Wood). We explore how a community-driven approach to archival research is necessary for investigating low-budget lesbian films such as this, and in turn, should inform accompanying curatorial practices. When screening lesser-known queer films, the community networks necessary to their creation and then later for their preservation tend to be overlooked in favor of celebrating the accomplishments of an individual director. If curators of queer film focus exclusively on the finished product and exhibit only remarkable films, they risk missing works that speak to queer filmmaking practices and the importance of these histories to queer community-building. To counteract these investments, we instead consider how strategies of collaboration can inform filmmaking, research methods, and curatorial practices, illuminating the relational networks that make queer art possible.

Beyond Norms and Realities

This paper examines the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, portraying a Chinese-American family navigating complex familial dynamics. The film, featuring stellar performances by Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, and Jamie Lee Curtis, garnered Oscars and marked a historic win for Asian women in the Best Actress category. Beyond its sci-fi front, the movie transcends genre boundaries, contributing significantly to new queer cinema. This paper argues that the film disrupts essentialist notions of race, sexuality, and gender by exploring diverse themes. Drawing from queer theory, this paper analyzes the film’s problematization of gender norms and Asian American stereotypes, as well as the encouragement of critical spectatorship in viewers. The analysis identifies the film’s deliberate use of queer codes, inviting viewers to think beyond conventions. The film confuses normative thinking, as demonstrated through Ke Huy Quan’s character, Waymond, who blurred assignments of masculinity and femininity. Finally, the analysis extends this critique to Asian American representation, interrogating stereotypes associated with the model minority myth. Through the film’s well-crafted storytelling and excellent performances by actors, this paper’s analysis demonstrates how a queer reading can encourage thinking beyond ‘normal.’

Repositioning Nordic film culture in Beijing, China: The Wandering in Scandinavia symposium

The Wandering in Scandinavia symposium, held at the UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing in December 2023, invited international experts, scholars and young academics to present new research on Nordic/Scandinavian film and television in China. The symposium offered an unprecedented opportunity to discuss the relevance of Nordic cinema in mainland China. While Nordic films are often considered niche products in the Chinese market, in an era of rapid globalization, Chinese scholarship offers a distinctive perspective on how Nordic films connect with and influence audiences and creatives in this vital market. Papers focused on Nordic feature films, including animation, and documentaries, examining these films from diverse perspectives, including auteurist studies, ecological research and historical investigation. The Young Scholars Forum introduced fresh perspectives on topics ranging from queer cinema to war films and new technologies, providing innovative examples of how Nordic cinema travels transnationally.

Rediscovering Guy Gilles, pioneer of queer

ABSTRACT This article positions Guy Gilles (1938–1996), an overlooked filmmaker at the periphery of the French New Wave, as an important pioneer of queer cinema. Situating Gilles in the context of the French gay liberation movement and the militant gay cinema of the 1970s, it brings the director in dialogue with the French philosopher, writer and activist Guy Hocquenghem, whose advocacy of a polyvocal sexual desire resonates with Gilles’s interrogation of traditional sexual taxonomies. Gilles’s fluid vision of sexuality is analysed in two seminal films, Absences répétées/Repeated Absences (1972) and Le Crime d’amour/For Love (1981), which crystallise the director’s exploration of non-normative desires and queer aesthetic. Reclaiming Gilles’s place in the wider genealogy of French queer cinema, the article seeks to contribute to the long-overdue rediscovery of this highly original director, who remains largely unknown in Film and Visual Studies.

No Strangers: Older Gay Men in the Films of Ventura Pons

In a career spanning more than five decades Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons (Barcelona, 1945) has directed over 30 films. His eclectic filmography does not easily fit categories or labels of any kind, including queer cinema. However, the frequent presence of gay male characters and same-sex desire in his films is significant, especially given the advanced age of a very high proportion of those men. Pons’ camera does not shy away from presenting their bodies as both desirable and desiring, older bodies that don’t hide away from the camera. Starting with a re-reading of Amic/Amat (1998) from the perspective of aging studies, the article focuses on key examples of older gay and queer men in his work, with special emphasis on films that Pons directed in his sixties (Forasters (2008), A la deriva (2009), Mil cretins (2010)). It identifies recurring themes and tropes in this context, such as cross-dressing, memory or inheritance and finds that the filmmaker’s interest in queer memory is closely linked to arguably the main preoccupation of his work: the cultural history of Catalonia.

Resistance in the City, in-between Bodies and “Dysfunctional” Languages

Abstract Based on the work of Kurdish film-maker Ali Kemal Çınar, this article investigates the intersections between Kurdish and queer cinema. It asks whether and how the notion of queer cinema might be expanded beyond Western contexts to include concerns related to ethnicity, resistance, and language. The article analyses Ali Kemal Çınar’s cinema from a queer perspective and sheds light on the way in which Çınar’s films speak to broader tendencies within queer cinema. It argues that viewing Ali Kemal Çınar’s films from a queer perspective allows us to expand the definition of Kurdish cinema and in this way build a bridge with queer cinema.

Introducing inclusive subtitles

Abstract In recent years, numerous variations of subtitling approaches, which have been variously defined as enriched, creative, dynamic, emotive (Neves 2018), but also ‘creactive’ (Sala Robert 2016), have been put forward by scholars in the attempt to diversify and expand the audiences’ access to audiovisual products through subtitles. Also, there has been a significant growth in international film festivals which, alongside long-established festivals, have contributed to providing audiences with a cultural window on the world. In Italy, for example, there are hundreds of film festivals, which vary in terms of size, subject-matter, and genre. Against the backdrop of recent research on audience(s) attending film festivals (Di Giovanni 2020), accessibility studies (Greco 2018), and preferences and familiarity with various types of subtitles for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people (Romero-Fresco 2015), this paper aims to introduce the notion of inclusive subtitling and to propose guidelines and applications within the context of accessible film festivals and cultural events. The corpus for this empirical study consists of the short films competing in the eleventh and twelfth editions of the Sicilia Queer Film Fest, inclusively subtitled. Results will prove that ‘inclusive subtitles’ have the potential to cater to more varied needs, embracing settings such as film festivals, theatres, museums, galleries, and similar cultural contexts. In line with Greco’s (2018) universalist approach, and in contrast with the recent introduction of the term by Martínez-Lorenzo (2020) applied to minoritised languages, inclusive subtitles is an expression that refers to intralingual or interlingual subtitles, open or closed (with the aid of external tools, such as an app) and applied specifically to film festivals.

Archiving the Past, Painting the Present

This paper focuses on the representations of diversity and feminism in the French fi lm Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fi lle en feu, 2019), directed by Céline Sciamma. Set in the 18th century, this fi lm addresses numerous contemporary issues through a feminist lens. This paper views Portrait of a Lady on Fire as a visual archive in the history of feminist and queer cinema, creating dialogues between the past and present. Concurrently, using Céline Sciamma as an entry point, the paper also explores the female authorship in the 21st-century French cinema.

Screening international queer cinema in China

ABSTRACT Given the restricted number of foreign films which can be officially screened in Mainland China and restrictions on the portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters in visual media, international queer cinema tends to be screened at non-theatrical events such as film festivals, film clubs and café screenings. Building on existing work on Chinese film festival studies, this article draws attention to the wider ecosystem of screening practices in China, which engage with international queer film culture through their choice of films and also their mediations of LGBTQ+ cultures. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how such events navigate language difference through translation, how they engage audiences through discussion or other means, and how they participate in the pink economy. The sorts of negotiation of meaning taking place demonstrate the complexity of transcultural queer cinema practices. The reception of films in translation leads to a notion of queer cinema in China as a cosmopolitan but local activity that contributes to local worldmaking practices.

Introduction: ‘Different (Everyone is So)’: conceptualisations of Russian and Russophone queer cinema in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT In the introduction I conceptualise cinematic narratives of difference and queerness, and the ways in which the queer lens has been used in contemporary Russian and Russophone cinema to interrogate cultural politics, identity and belonging. I also demonstrate how a queer optic facilitates discussions about the complexity of the terms ‘Russian’ and ‘Russophone’ vis-à-vis other cultural identities and queer subjectivities, emphasising the transnational, poly-cultural nature of Russian culture, with queer individuals playing an important role in de-colonising ‘Russia’. In particular, I discuss spaces and geographies of queer experience in relation to new centres and practices of filmmaking in the RF. I showcase the diversity of queer cinematic expressions, pointing at the ways in which the canon of Russian cinema could be revised. The interdisciplinary, multi-scalar analysis interrogates a range of discourses – academic, film criticism, media and politics – and phenomena such as cultural industry and institutions, cultural politics, sociology of queerness, and technology. Making use of a number of examples, I put forward a vision for a theory of contemporary Russian and Russophone queer cinema which expands the knowledge of (world) queer cinemas and (queer) world cinemas.

Screening through silence: The representation of queerness in Retablo (2017)

Retablo is a feature-length film, mostly shot in Quechua language, centred on an Indigenous family who lives in the Peruvian Andes and makes a living as artisans of the eponymous folk art. The main storyline is about Segundo, a 14-year-old only-child and apprentice, whose close relationship with his father and master, Noé, is drastically altered when it is revealed that the latter has sexual relationships with other men. Drawing from decolonial queer theory (Gomes-Pereira, Miskolci, Pelúcio), in this article I rehearse an analysis of Retablo as a case study to reconsider the notion of queer cinema and the representation of queer experiences on the continent. First, I review the use of ‘queer’ in Latin American film scholarship and argue for an understanding of the category not focused on issues such as identity, homophobia and machismo, but on the cinematic formal strategies used to portray local queer practices. Following this line of thought, I engage with Schoonover and Galt’s argument that film is a ‘queerly inflected medium’ to probe how Retablo’s attempt to incite a queer spectatorship using an Indigenous aesthetic grammar illustrates the intertwining between global queer cinema and local elaborations of sexual difference. Lastly, I use the category of ‘silence’ (Sifuentes-Jaúregui) to study Retablo’s alternative representation of queer sexuality. I suggest that the film’s depiction of queer desires resorting to unnaming and concealing is an example of an alternative figuration of queer subjectivity in Latin American cinema, one distanced from the Anglo-American narratives of ‘coming out’.

Queering Russian cinema as a community-building practice

ABSTRACT LGBTQ media discourses in contemporary Russia have been extensively researched from the perspectives of media and queer studies. Scholars have theorised whether ‘queerness’ can be appropriated from the West and localised in Russia for the benefit of local LGBTQ communities. Building on existing scholarship, this article examines media discourses on queer film as initiated and maintained by representatives of Russian LGBTQ film audiences. I investigate how LGBTQ opinion leaders appropriate the term kvir (queer) in the context of viewing and interpreting contemporary, post-Soviet, and Soviet Russian cinema. I analyse how ‘queering’ is used as the optics for discerning obvious or ciphered visual and verbal expressions of non-heteronormative gender and sexuality on screen, at the same time reclaiming narratives of the recent and remote past, as both shared and individual LGBTQ histories.

Queer Cinema in Contemporary France: Five Directors. By Todd W. Reeser

<i>Queer Cinema in Contemporary France: Five Directors</i>. By Todd W. Reeser

‘Papa, I am gay, please, love me’: Politics of censorship and queer representation in Bollywood

The article explores the problematic issues that arise between Bollywood films projecting homosexual relationships and the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) filtering their contents. Queer popular cultural representations in India face challenges to get release certification because of their inherently debatable contents including ‘non-normative’ sexual relationships which are largely identified as a potential threat to the existing heteronormative, majoritarian culture. By giving reference to two queer films, Unfreedom and Angry Indian Goddesses, this article explores the politics of censorship in the light of Foucauldian power relations and the discourse of knowledge production. I argue that by proscribing representations of queer sexualities in films, the CBFC has acted on behalf of the state in decelerating the formation and proliferation of a counter cultural movement to balance homophobia discursively and to peddle majoritarian power politics, and thus the notion of heterosexuality as compulsory form of sexual behaviour is popularized and consolidated in Indian society.

Lee Wallace, Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage (a Camera Obscura book)

Journal Article Lee Wallace, Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage (a Camera Obscura book) Get access Lee Wallace, Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage (a Camera Obscura book). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 264 pp. Rex Butler Rex Butler Email: rex.butler@monash.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 64, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 254–256, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjad021 Published: 21 June 2023

"It Means Possibility"

Following the cataclysmic AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, a defiant embrace of the word "queer" and new technology sparked an influx of films by independent filmmakers that were later termed "New Queer Cinema." As a product of its time, New Queer Cinema interrogates the heteronormativity it conflicts with and thus breeds a reimagining of what queer film can look like. The conflict between queer identity and its heteronormative surroundings drives distance between queer individuals and their communities, as well as larger social structures. This distance leads to a sense of isolation. This article explores themes of isolation within select New Queer Cinema films and offers a potential reference point from which we can understand queer life and cultural production in the midst of yet another global illness—COVID-19. Gus Van Sant’s 'My Own Private Idaho' (1991) highlights isolation from heteronormative social structures, particularly the nuclear family unit. Cheryl Dunye’s 'The Watermelon Woman' (1996) focuses on a curation of queer kinship as a survival tactic in the face of this isolation. Gregg Araki’s 'Totally Fucked Up' (1993) and Thomas Bezucha’s 'Big Eden' (2000) both explore themes of self-imposed isolation. 'Totally Fucked Up' provides an essential New Queer Cinema perspective of this phenomenon; meanwhile, 'Big Eden' challenges assumptions that queer individuals are destined to be isolated by imagining a future in which this is not the case. Themes of isolation are essential to the New Queer Cinema genre as a product of its circumstances. Yet, it also provides a basis from which the possibilities of future queer cinema and culture can be imagined. Understanding this relationship is critical as we begin to understand the effects of structural and social isolation on the queer community as exacerbated by COVID-19.