2SLGBTQQIA+

Queer Cinema, The Film Reader examines the relationship between cinematic representations of sexuality and their social, historical, and industrial contexts. Clearly divided into an introductory overview and four topic areas, the Reader explores how recent critical thinking has approached queer sexualities in relation to the cinema. The four sections discuss:
- Authorship - examining the role of sexuality in the work of queer filmmakers such as George Cukor, Dorothy Arzner, Barbara Hammer, and the directors of New Queer Cinema
- Forms - exploring how genres such as the horror film, the musical, film noir, and the animated film construct queer cinematic spaces
- Camp - looking at how this reception strategy and mode of textual production, initially practised by pre-Stonewall queers, retains its critical charge even in contemporary mainstream popular culture
- Reception - considering three specific historical case-studies of how queer fans have interacted with media texts from Judy Garland to Star Trek.
The Reader concludes with an essay that queerly rethinks classical gaze theory and allows students and scholars of the subject to draw their own conclusions in their studies.

Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe&;institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging

Coined in the early 1990s to describe a burgeoning film movement, “New Queer Cinema” has turned the attention of film theorists, students, and audiences to the proliferation of intelligent, stylish, and daring work by lesbian and gay filmmakers within independent cinema and to the infiltration of “queer” images and themes into the mainstream. Why did this shift take place? Was it political gains, cultural momentum, or market forces that energized the evolution and transformation of this cinematic genre?

This collection brings together the work of both film scholars and queer theorists to advance a more sophisticated notion of queer film criticism. While the “politics of representation” has been the focus of much previous gay and lesbian film criticism, the contributors to Out Takes employ the approaches of queer theory to move beyond conventional readings and to reexamine aspects of the cinematic gaze in relation to queer desire and spectatorship.

This innovative collection brings together work from several disciplines to address the politics of queer representation in global contexts. Articles cover many aspects of contemporary culture, including the queer cowboy, the emergence of lesbian chic, and the expansion of queer representations of blackness alongside work on queer, Taiwanese, online communities; a transgender Israeli pop star; and film mimicry in Kerala, India. This accessible volume offers useful analytical tools that will help readers make sense of the problems and promise of queer pop culture

British Queer Cinema draws together a diverse range of innovative new essays that explore, for the first time, the provocative history of lesbian, gay and queer representation in British cinema.
From the early years of ‘Pre-Gay’ film, through to the social upheaval of post-war ‘permissiveness’, Gay Liberation and the ‘post-AIDS’ queer generation, contributors examine the shifting and complex nature of queer identity, desire and spectatorship across a number of classical and contemporary British popular film genres and traditions. Through case studies of key works such as The Killing of Sister George, Prick Up Your Ears and Beautiful Thing, a reappraisal of the films of Anthony Asquith, Terence Davies and Derek Jarman, to the ‘queerness’ of the heritage film, the homoerotic ‘New Wave’, or the star performances of Dirk Bogarde, Beryl Reid and Stephen Fry, this timely collection maps the relationship between contemporary queer sexuality and its socio-historical, national and critical contexts.

In Shimmering Images Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change. Drawing on Barthes's idea of the “shimmer” and Foucault's notion of sex as a mirage, the author shows how sex and gender can appear mirage-like on film, an effect they label shimmering. Steinbock applies the concept of shimmering—which delineates change in its emergent form as well as the qualities of transforming bodies, images, and affects—to analyses of films that span time and genre. These include examinations of the fantastic and phantasmagorical shimmerings of sex change in Georges Méliès's nineteenth-century trick films and Lili Elbe's 1931 autobiographical writings and photomontage in Man into Woman. Steinbock also explores more recent documentaries, science fiction, and pornographic and experimental films. Presenting a cinematic philosophy of transgender embodiment that demonstrates how shimmering images mediate transitioning, Steinbock not only offers a corrective to the gender binary orientation of feminist film theory; they open up new means to understand trans ontologies and epistemologies as emergent, affective, and processual.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski are intensely political film writers, directors, and producers whose work has made an indelible impact on American popular culture. From The Matrix (1999) to Cloud Atlas (2012), they have left their mark as innovators in the industry, consistently pushing the boundaries of what is perceived as technically and topically possible in studio film. They are also the world's first major transgender film directors and arguably the most influential transgender cultural producers in human history. Their coming out makes possible a reevaluation of the Wachowskis' entire oeuvre as curating alternate approaches to gender, emobodiment, and perception, that might be retrospectively theorized as "trans." In this study, Cael Keegan will argue that the Wachowskis' work can be read as an aesthetic history of transgender political consciousness as it has evolved in popular media. He explores the significance of the Wachowskis as film and genre innovators who have permanently altered the technologyand aesthetics of mainstream Hollywood cinema. Keegan sees the radical identities at play in many of their early films as emerging from a queer sensibility and and a hoped-for sense of the body's plasticity. Moving chronologically through the Wachowskis'filmography, he uses the films' theorization of gender and embodied identity at the intersection of convergence, virtuality, biopolitical surveillance and capitalist realism to open these much-discussed works to new modes of analysis

Chapter on Queer Animation: Animating revolt and revolting animation.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

"This book presents a critical cultural study of the Trans New Wave as a cinematic genre and explores its emergence in the twenty first century. Drawing on a diverse range of texts, the cultural, social, aesthetic and ethical implications of the genre are placed within the context of rapidly changing understandings of gender diversity. From the cinematic borderlands of independent film festivals, to wider public recognition via digital technologies, the genre encompasses a diverse range of texts from short films, documentaries, experimental films, to feature films and narratives that range across life histories, narratives and themes. The book presents transliteracy as an original theoretical approach to reading film representations of the Trans New Wave, and combines it with a new theoretical concept of cinematic ethnogenesis to investigate how the genre emerged from specific communities and the reciprocal interaction of audiences and texts. This interdisciplinary volume engages with contemporary issues of gender diversity, transgender studies, screen and media studies and film festival studies, and as such will be of great interest to scholars working in these fields and in media and cultural studies more generally." - Publisher

Through exclusive interviews with protagonists like Bruce LaBruce, G.B. Jones, John Waters, and many more, alongside a treasure trove of never-before-seen photographs and reprinted zines, Queercore traces the history of a scene originally ''fabricated'' in the bedrooms and coffee shops of Toronto and San Francisco by a few young, queer punks to its emergence as a relevant and real revolution.