QUEER CINEMA in the Wo Wor ld KARL SCHOONOVER ROSALIND GALT
QUEER CINEMA in the World
KARL SCHOONOVER ROSALIND GALT Duke University Press Durham and London 201 20166
QUEER CINEMA in the World
KARL SCHOONOVER ROSALIND GALT Duke University Press Durham and London 201 20166
© 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States o Amer ica on acid-ree acid-ree paper Designed by Heather Hensley ypeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services
∞
Library o Congress C ongress Cataloging-inCataloging-in-Publication Publication Data Names: Schoonover, Karl, author. | Galt, Rosalind, author. itle: Queer cinema in the world / Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical bibliographical reerences and index. Identi�ers: ���� 2016021422 (print) | ���� 2016023364 (ebook) ���� 9780822362463 (hardcover (hardcover : alk. paper) ���� 9780822362616 (pbk. : alk.paper) ���� 9780822373674 (e-book) (e-book) Subjects: ����: Homosexuality Homosexuality in motion pictures. | Homosexuality Homo sexuality and motion pictures. | Motion pictures—Polit pictures— Political ical aspects. | Mass media and gays—Polit gays—Political ical aspects. aspec ts. Classi�cation:: ��� ��1995.9.�55 �37 2016 (print) | Classi�cation ��� ��1995.9.�55 (ebook) | ��� 791.43/653—dc23 791.43/653— dc23 �� record record available at https://lccn https:// lccn..loc loc..gov gov//2016021422 Cover art: Pojktanten/She Male Snails , 2012, photo by Minka Jakerson, Courtesy o Ester Martin Bergsmark.
—
To our loves
—
CONTENTS
��������������� ������� �������� ix INTRODUCTION
Queer, World, Cinema 1 CHAPTER �
Figures in the World: Te Geopolitics o the ranscultural Queer 35 CHAPTER �
A Worldly Affair: Queer Film Festivals and Global Space 79 CHAPTER �
Speaking Otherwise: Otherwise: Allegory, Narrative, Narra tive, and Queer Public Space 119 CHAPTER �
Te Queer Popular: Popular: Genre and Perverse Economies o Scale 167 CHAPTER �
Registers o Belonging B elonging:: Queer Worldly Affects 211 CHAPTER �
Te Emergence o Queer Cinematic ime 259 ����� 305
������������ 339 ����� 357
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
Tis book is the result o collaborative thinking. It is an experiment in co-authorship, as the names on its ront cover declare. But even more than in other projects, we eel indebted to the people who have stimulated, debated, and encouraged the thinking between its covers. Tis has been a truly queer collaboration whose many participants have nurtured and transormed how we think about cinema and the world. Tis project bene�ted at a critical stage rom the support o the Arts and Humanities Research Council (����), which unded a series o symposia and queer �lm events as part o the Global Queer Cinema (���) research network. Tis network could not have happened without the dedication o the brilliant Laura Ellen Joyce. During the lie o this grant, we were able to work with an inspiring group o queer scholars, �lmmakers, and programmers, including Cüneyt Çakırlar, the late Suzy Capo, Rohit Dasgupta, David Eng, Campbell X, Gayatri Gopinath, Catherine Grant, Samar Habib, Jim Hubbard, Stephen Kent Jusick, Kam Wai Kui, Michael Lawrence, Song Hwee Lim, Shamira Meghani, Nguyen an Hoang, Sridhar Rangayan, John David Rhodes, B. Ruby Rich, Brian Robinson, Deborah Shaw, Juan Suárez, and Patricia White. Te conversations and work that was shared at these symposia was invaluable or revisions to the book. More important, the
symposia generated a rare atmosphere o intellectual exchange, antihierarchical thinking, and riendship. We have tried to bring some o that spirit into this volume. Many �lmmakers and artists generously shared their work and their time with us, and we thank Karim Aïnouz, Clara Bodén, Jayan Cherian, Igor Grubić, Maryam Keshavarz, Daniel McIntyre, Mitsuyo Miyazaki, Anurupa Prakash, Noman Robin, Navid Sinaki, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. We also thank Ollie Charles and Droo Padhiar at Peccadillo Pictures. J. B. Capino, Sarah Hodges, Cynthia Yu-Hua Li, Lin Shu-yi, Karolina Szpyrko, and Marta Wasik were generous with their time, experiences, and personal archives o queer cinema. Caine Youngman and Nick Bullock generously allowed us to reproduce their photographs. So many people nourished this project along the way by sharing their scholarship, engaging us in intellectually inspiring conversations about queer cinema, and providing moral support when it was needed. Tey include Dudley Andrew, Augusto Arbizo, Hongwei Bao, Rosa Barotsi, onci Kranjcevic Batalic, Ariella Ben-Dov, Shoshana Cohen Ben-Yoar, Mark Betz, Gilberto Blasini, Anthony Bonet, Chris Cagle, Jih-Fei Cheng, Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Jeffery Conway, Nick Davis, Vilma De Gasperin, Cheryl Dunye, Richard Dyer, João Ferreira, Matthew Flanagan, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Shohini Ghosh, Ivan Girina, Bex Harper, Kenneth Harrow, Dan Herbert, Lucas Hilderbrand, Homay King, Eunah Lee, Helen Leung, Bliss Cua Lim, Eng-Beng Lim, Katharina Lindner, Denilson Lopes, Sanda Lwin, Raael Maniglia, Douglas Martin, Candace Moore, Ros Murray, Matilde Nardelli, Nancy Nicol, David Wallace Pansing, Victor Perkins, Flavio Ribeiro, Connor Ryan, Ingrid Ryberg, Bhaskar Sarkar, Mina Shin, Marc Siegel, Gerald Sim, racey Sinclair, Eliza Steinbock, James weedie, Patricia Villalobos Echeverría, Michael Wade, Jean Walton, Phyllis Waugh, Tomas Waugh, Cynthia Weber, Helen Wheatley, Jennier Wild, Josette Wolthuis, and Bryan Wuest. Te anonymous readers offered generous responses to the manuscript, and their advice generated some crucial revisions. Teir enthusiasm or the necessity o the project was sustaining, as was the help o Shannon McLaughlin, Brendan O’Neill, and Nicole Rizzuto, who were integral to its intellectual development. Peter Limbrick provided vital support, scholarly and otherwise. We presented portions o this book in several talks and seminars, and we grateully acknowledge the hospitality o our hosts: Jackie Stacey, Monica Pearl and the participants at the Manchester University Sexuality Summer School; the Cornerhouse Cinema in Manchester; Elena Gor�nkel, Patrice x |
Acknowledgments
Petro, and ami Williams at University o Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Anna Stenport, Lilya Kaganovsky, Julie urnock, and Lauren Goodlad at the Uni versity o Illinois, Champaign-Urbana; Natalia Brizuela at the University o Caliornia, Berkeley; Barbara Mennel and Amie Kreppel at the University o Florida; Jon Binnie and Christian Klesse at the Queer Film Festivals as Activism Conerence at Manchester Metropolitan University; Conn Holohan at the National University o Ireland, Galway; Skadi Loist at the Uni versity o Hamburg; Steano Baschiera at Queen’s University, Belast; and Karla Bessa and Marcos Antonio Rocha at the Curto O Gênero Festival in Fortaleza, Brazil. In each o these places, we encountered engaged audiences who posed questions that helped us hone our arguments. We also experienced unprecedented hospitality rom the scholars, curators, and students who shared meals with us, showed us bats and alligators, and invited us to dance parties. Heartelt thanks go to colleagues and students at our home institutions, who have supported the book in ways big and small: at the University o Warwick, José Arroyo, Charlotte Brunsdon, Stella Bruzzi, Jon Burrows, Howard Chiang, Ilana Emmet, racey McVey, Dee Marco, Rachel Moseley, Alastair Phillips, and Charlotte Stevens; at the University o Sussex, Tomas Austin, Anjuli Daskarolis, Sarah Maddox, Sally Munt, Rachel O’Connell, Sue Tornham, and Amelia Wakeord; and at King’s College, London, Chris Berry, Sarah Cooper, Victor Fan, Russell Goulbourne, Lawrence Napper, Michelle Pierson, and Sarah Rowe, as well as our incomparable graduate assistant Kelly Samaris. Tanks also go to the staff at the British Film Institute; the British Library; the Bodleian Library; Jane Lawson at the Vere Harmsworth Library, University o Oxord; the Paci�c Film Archive; the University o Caliornia, Berkeley; and K. C. Price at Frameline. Everyone at ��� Flare: London ���� Film Festival welcomed us year afer year, and we especially thank Brian Robinson or including us. Cine-City: Te Brighton Film Festival provided a antastic home or several queer �lm programs, and Nicky Beaumont, im Brown, and Frank Gray all helped us to make things happen. Te Brighton and Hove City Council let us screen lots o unrated experimental �lms without batting an eye. Te National Teatre espresso bar contributed a good amount o mid-afernoon energy (caffeinated and electric). Courtney Berger understood the stakes o this project rom early on and has made Duke University Press the ideal home or the book. We are grateul or her support, her unaltering sense o the project’s direction, and her careul shepherding o the process. Sandra Korn has smoothed the way at Acknowledgments | xi
every stage, and our thanks go also to Sara Leone and Susan Deeks or their support and hard work during the book’s production. Te discussion o �lm estival branding in chapter 2 was published as “Queer or Human? Film Festivals, Human Rights and Global Film Culture,” Screen 56, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 121–32. Part o our discussion o Undertow in “Hypotheses on the Queer Middlebrow,” in Middlebrow Cinema, ed. Sally Faulkner (London: Routledge, 2016), led us to our argument on the �lm in chapter 1. Small sections o the discussion o Apichatpong in chapter 6 appear in a different version in “Slowness as Intimacy in Apichatpong’s Mekong Hotel ,” In Media Res (December 2012), http://mediacommons.utureofhebook.org /imr/2012/12/12/slowness-intimacy-apichatpong-s-mekong-hotel. We are grateul to Screen, Routledge, and In Media Res or the permission to publish these earlier pieces in their present orm. Finally, we thank Lloyd Pratt and Adrian Goycoolea or their boundless patience and goodwill toward a queer collaboration that took over all o our lives. Tey are our heroines. Without them, you would not be reading these words.
xii
|
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION Queer, World, Cinema
Maryam Keshavarz’s �lm Circumstance (2011) uses a scene o �lm consumption to expose the international ault lines o politics and sexuality. Te �lm is set in contemporary ehran and centers on two young Iranian women, Ataeh and Shireen, who are in love but are compelled to hide their relationship. With their riends Joey and Hossein, the women visit a back-room video store to buy Western movies (�gure I.1). Tey come across Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008) and begin to discuss its politics. For Joey and Hossein, Milk matters primarily not as a story o gay rights but as a story o political activism and an inspiring example o grassroots organizing or the youth o Iran. Tus, Joey proclaims, “Tis �lm is not about ucking. It is about human rights!” to which Ataeh responds, “Fucking is a human right.” Te question o how to read a �lm such as Milk and what a “gay” �lm might signiy internationally is explicitly played out in this exchange. I ucking is a human right, then queerness takes its place on a certain kind o
Fig. �.1: A video store provides space to discuss human rights in Circumstance .
world stage. But is that space o “human rights” the only one in which nonWestern queerness can be made palpable in cinema? Or, is it ethnocentric to demand that non-Western queer desire be understood in terms o Western gay identity politics? Is it right, as Joey implies, to appropriate American gay rights struggles or other political causes and in other cultural contexts? Tese questions that Circumstance poses textually have proved equally contentious in the �lm’s critical and scholarly reception. Te �lm has been both welcomed as a positive account o lesbian desire in Iran and critiqued as an Islamophobic product o an ethnocentric Western logic. � In both cases, the �lm cannot help but provoke the question o queers in the world and o cinema’s role in queer world politics. Circumstance anticipates the challenges involved in representing queerness cross-culturally. Te �lm is perhaps unusually aware o the pitalls o such translocation, since Keshavarz shot in Lebanon with a ake script to protect her cast and crew rom authorities. Cinema as an institution and a practice is not a neutral mediator o lesbian representation or Keshavarz but has a quite material politics that is then encoded into the �lm itsel. But this impetus to thematize cinema textually can be seen in a striking number o contemporary queer �lms that allude meta-textually to cinema’s institutional spaces. Tis recurrence o the social apparatus o cinema as a textual moti alerts us to cinema’s unique role in sustaining and making evident queer counterpublics. Video stores, or example, are ofen posed as sites o cultural intersection, and they �gure the messy intermingling o community identity and individual desire across such disparate �lms as Te Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, dir., 1996), Fire (Deepa Mehta, dir., 1996), Nina’s Heavenly 2
|
Introduction
Fig. �.2: A scene of communal �lm consumption in The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros.
Delights (Pratibha Parmar, dir., 2006), J’ai tué ma mėre/I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan, dir., 2009), and Parada/Te Parade (Srđjan Dragojević, dir.,
2011). Communal �lm consumption occupies a privileged space o queer longing in Ang pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros/Te Blossoming o Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, dir., 2005; �gure I.2), Bu San/Good Bye, Dragon Inn (sai Ming-liang, dir., 2003), Ni na bian ji dian/What ime Is It Tere? (sai Ming-liang, dir., 2001), and the short Last Full Show (Mark V. Reyes, dir., 2005). Te locations in which queer people access cinema have even become the subject o several recent documentaries that have ocused on queer �lm estivals and their audiences, such as Acting Out: �� Years o Film and Community in Hamburg (Cristina Magadlinou, Silvia orneden, and Ana Grillo, dirs., 2014) and Queer Artivism (Masa Zia Lenárdic and Anja Wutej, dirs., 2013). Cinema makes queer spaces possible, but at the same time, what cinema means in these �lms is rarely prescriptive. It is a space that is never quite resolved or decided, at once local and global, public and private, mainstream and underground; it produces spaces o dominance and resistance. O course, or the video store as much as the queer �lm estival, reception ofen depends on translation. � Circumstance eatures a scene o translation in which, later in the narrative, the our riends are employed to dub Milk into Farsi (�gure I.3). Watching them record over the original English dialogue, the viewer might be tempted to see the scene as a metaphor or the translatability o sexuality and politics, but the conclusions we are intended to draw are by no means clear. Are these Iranian youths copying American Introduction
|
3
Fig. �.3: Circumstance ’s protagonists dub the American �lm Milk into Farsi.
sexual identities and misappropriating a Western politics o coming out? Or are they writing over—more literally, speaking over—that American text, replacing it with an Iranian idiom? Or is the process o translation more ambivalent?� Trough its dramatization o translation, the �lm is able to articulate simultaneously not only Iranian versus American cultural politics, but also the women’s spoken and unspoken desires and their public and co vert identities. Te viewer’s ability to see the layering o visible identity and hidden meanings simultaneously is enabled by the act that Circumstance itsel is a �lm. Te multilayered meanings o this scene are produced by its use o cinematic spaces and orms: the separate production o sound and image in the dubbing scenario creates virtual spaces or the articulation o samesex desire. Te �lm thus exploits both the theme o transnational cinema and the ormal complexities o cinematic narration, and in that exploration it interrogates the stability conventionally granted to distinctions o public and private, straight and queer, Euro-American and Iranian. o understand queerness in the world, then, Circumstance tells us that we have to think not just about the representations on-screen but about the cinematic apparatus itsel, its mechanisms o articulation, and its modes o transnational circulation. Tis book draws critical attention to the place o queer cinema in the world: what might or could the world mean to queers, and what does queer cinema mean or the world? By bringing the reader to the intersection o queer politics and world cinema, it asks both how queer �lms construct ways o being in the world and what the political value is o the worlds that queer cinema creates. o propose a queer world cinema is to invite trouble. 4
|
Introduction
Te combination o terms provokes a series o anxieties about the certainty o knowing and the privilege o position; it raises ears o mistranslation, o neocolonial domination, o homogeneity and the leveling o difference. It suggests the orcing o meaning or the instrumentalization o �lm aesthetics in support o a limiting identity politics. In researching and presenting this project, we have encountered all o these concerns, ofen underwritten by a sense among those involved in queer �lm culture that the terms “world,” “queer,” and “cinema” should not be spoken together by those sensitive to global politics and cultural difference. Despite our agreement with the political and aesthetic stakes o this reluctance, we are placing these terms together in a risky venture. Our willul evocation o queer/world/cinema insists that queer cinema enables different ways o being in the world and, more than this, that it creates different worlds. Cinema is always involved in world making, and queerness promises to knock off kilter conventional epistemologies. Tinking queerness together with cinema thus has a potential to recon�gure dominant modes o worlding. We use this term “worlding” to describe queer cinema’s ongoing process o constructing worlds, a process that is active, incomplete, and contestatory and that does not presuppose a settled cartography. Any utterance about the world contains a politics o scale that proposes particular parameters or that world, and we insist on de-reiying the taken-or-granted qualities that these parameters ofen possess. We see �lm texts as active in this process. Worlding necessarily includes (though is not limited to) the many processes and concepts that have gained traction in thinking about the planet’s cultures: globalization, transnational identi�cation, diaspora, postcolonialism, internationalism, ecology, cosmopolitanism, and so on. We argue that queer cinema elaborates new accounts o the world, offering alternatives to embedded capitalist, national, hetero- and homonormative maps; revising the �ows and politics o world cinema; and orging dissident scales o affiliation, affection, affect, and orm.� We need all three terms—queer, world, and cinema—to make this argument. Tere is an emerging literature on globality within queer theory that takes on neoliberal economics, the complicity o “queer” in homonationalism and globalization, and the limitations o Western models o ���� identity to engage the gendered and sexual lie worlds o the global South. Tis scholarship is important to our project, but it misses what is unique about cinema and its ability to nourish queer spaces that are not reducible to capital, both textually and institutionally. Similarly, a critical awareness o the global rame has challenged and revised the traditional rubrics o Introduction
|
5
�lm studies, in�ecting national, generic, and industrial studies with categories such as the transnational, diasporic, the exilic, and migrant. However, these studies too ofen have been partitioned away rom the innovations o queer theory, leaving an overly hetero account o the shapes o the cinematic world. Finally, scholarship on queer cinema orms a crucial basis or our analysis, rom pathbreaking studies o lesbian and gay representation to criticism o the New Queer Cinema (���), queer experimental �lm, �lm estivals, and more. We draw widely on this archive, but despite signi�cant studies o national and regional cinema, queer �lm studies has yet to ully engage the challenges o the global. Tese three oundational concepts— queer, world, and cinema—provide theoretical pathways into our argument. Each term is contested, and when brought together they prompt us to ask what kinds o global communities are produced (or precluded) by queer �lm consumption and how presiding visions o the global depend on the inclusion or exclusion o queer lives. In this introduction, we map the stakes, or us, o queer cinema in the world. What’s Queer about Cinema?
Cinema might appear more stable as a concept than either queer or world, but this book is as much a work o �lm theory as o queer critique, and the meanings o cinema cannot be taken or granted. Te queer worlds we explore are made available through cinema’s technologies, institutional practices, and aesthetic orms, which together animate spaces, affective registers, temporalities, pleasures, and instabilities unique to the cinematic sensorium. It is crucial to affi rm that cinema is not simply a neutral host or ���� representations but is, rather, a queerly in�ected medium. o adapt Jasbir Puar’s terminology, we understand cinema as a queer assemblage.� Part o what makes popular cinema popular is the queer pleasures o spectatorship. Te ease with which audiences identiy and desire across expected lines o gender is what gives classical Hollywood, or example, its seductive and transgressive appeal.� We can develop Alexander Doty’s account o queer pleasures in classical cinema i we think about how Hollywood’s narration o point o view asks all spectators to adopt the perspectives o various and ofen incommensurate personae within even the same scene. Few audience members are allowed a perectly re�ective or narcissistic relationship to the bodies on-screen. In act, one o the inamous debates o canonical eminist �lm theory surrounds Laura Mulvey’s use o the word “transvestite” to describe how Hollywood �lms demand that a emale spectator oscillate her identi�cation, ofen adopting a position in discourse aligned with male 6
|
Introduction
agency and the male gaze.� While these debates were sometimes accused o heterocentrism, they nonetheless point to how the basic operation o the Hollywood text requires a certain gender mobility.� I these ambidextrous a�nities render all spectatorship potentially queer, cinematic traditions have developed variegated ways to play with this capacity. O course, mainstream cinemas have means o damping down queer identi�catory structures via the gaze, especially Hollywood itsel (as Mulvey has taught us), but as with eminist �lm theory’s critique o the gendered gaze, the site o ideological struggle is the structure o the image rather than simply its content. We see this tension in the �lms o Ferzan Özpetek: both Hamam/Steam: Te urkish Bath (1997) and Mine Vaganti/Loose Cannons (2010) play with the gendered ambiguity o the desiring gaze, shuttling between same-sex and opposite-sex identi�cations. Te dynamism o the cinematic image pushes against the rei�cation o meaning, as it keeps the signi�er in motion, never �xing terms o relationality. Maria San Filippo has argued or “the bisexual space o cinema” as a potentiality, constituted by “textual sites (spatio-temporal locations) and spectatorial sights (ways o seeing) that indicate how sexuality as well as gender is irreducible to and always already in excess o dominant culture’s monosexual, heterocentrist paradigm.”� Not all �lms activate bisexual space, but cinema’s sensory apparatus constantly alludes to its potential. Tis dynamic spatiality pushes against normative sexualities and genders but also against the sedimented systems o the globalized world. For instance, the Egyptian �lmmaker Yousse Chahine links sexuality, critiques o globalization, and �lm aesthetics in an interview. When Joseph Massad asks Chahine how he interrelates his aesthetic sense with his political message, Chahine responds that politics are inevitable in cinema. Afer critiquing the inequalities o the supposed open market o globalization, he notes that what is happening in the world “even in�uences your sex lie; what happens in bed depends upon what is happening in politics.”�� Or, as Benigno Sánchez-Eppeler and Cindy Patton put it, “Sexuality is intimately and immediately elt, but publicly and internationally described and mediated.”�� Politics inuses sex, and cinema is the place where this intertwining o the intimate and the public can be visibly registered. Cinema does not merely offer a con venient institutional space o distribution and exhibition in ���� �lm estivals and cosmopolitan art houses. Rather, it produces queer identi�cation, desire, and �gurability as a constituent eature o the medium. It is important to stipulate this queer stratum o the cinematic so that when we consider how to de�ne queer cinema, we are not tempted merely Introduction
|
7
to instrumentalize identities or representational content. Corralling a category o “queer cinema” is tricky. Some scholars have ound it crucial to distinguish an identitarian strand o lesbian and gay cinema rom a more radical (or at least anti-identitarian) queer practice.�� We might de�ne queer �lms in this way, or with reerence to queer directors, or again as those �lms viewed by queer audiences. But who is excluded when these logics are imposed as the prerequisite or de�ning queer cinema? Each o these common-sense approaches is undone by its insistent privileging o Western or other dominant practices o cinema. Tus, �lmmakers outside the West may not be “out” as gay and, indeed, may not �nd the rhetoric o visibility useul or relevant or their sense o sel. Similarly, any presumption o what a queer audience might look like is ofen underwritten by insidious cultural assumptions. Madhava Prasad writes that whereas reception studies see Western spectators as complex and autonomous in their interpretations o texts, ethnographic studies understand non-Western spectators as reading only and exactly what the text directly presents.�� Tis is equally a problem or queer world cinema, which is too rarely granted complexity in its reception contexts. Sometimes �lms are queer in certain contexts and not in others. Perhaps because o our interest in these questions o knowledge (How do we know queer cinema when we see it? Will we always recognize queer �lms as queer?), we are alert to those moments in which oreign �lms are claimed as queer or imagined as not queer. Many o the �lms canonized as contemporary world cinema engage with queer issues or eature queer characters, but they are inrequently analyzed by queer �lm studies or recognized by their straight advocates as queer endeavors. For example, within Tailand Apichatpong Weerasethakul is regarded as gay, and his artistic practice is understood as queer. However, he has been embraced in the West by mainstream critics and proponents o art cinema as an international auteur.�� His �lms are more likely to be screened in world cinema venues (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, New York’s Museum o Modern Art) than in ���� �lm esti vals. Similarly, some critics have accused the aiwanese director sai Mingliang o overusing sexually ambiguous characters as a way to cater to oreign audiences, whereas recent scholarship has engaged with the complexity o his affiliations to queerness, sexual acts, and �lm style.�� As Fran Martin puts it, “His �lms’ obsessive and ultimately denaturalizing ocus on sexual behaviours rather than sexual identities does seem to preclude a reading o his cinema as straightorwardly ‘gay’ in the sense o sexual identity politics.”�� So while it is clear that the remit o queer �lm must be expanded, how to 8
|
Introduction
Fig. �.4: Same-sex intimacy is visible in classic Hindi �lms such as Razia Sultan.
do this is raught with epistemological instabilities that are as geopolitical as they are sociological. From its start, queer �lm studies has included those seemingly straight �lms that ���� audiences have made indelibly queer. In act, one well-known anthology—Queer Cinema: Te Film Reader —is largely concerned with reception issues.�� For scholars o Indian cinema such as Rajinder Dudrah and Gayatri Gopinath, popular Hindi �lms ofen �aunt homosocial bonds in ways that invite re-coding by audiences looking or same-sex intimacies on-screen (e.g., Sholay [Ramesh Sippy, dir., 1975], Pakeezah [Kamal Amrohi, dir., 1972]).�� Te only slightly submerged networks o orbidden desire in �lms such as Mughal-e- Azam (K. Asi, dir., 1960) and Razia Sultan (Kamal Amrohi, dir., 1983; �gure I.4) become the means by which queer audiences have adopted mainstream cinema as their own. Stanley Kwan similarly mines the history o popular Chinese cinema or queer subtexts and pleasures in his documentary Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (1996). More recently, in Pop! (2012), the Iranian artist Navid Sinaki deploys ound ootage rom prerevolutionary popular Persian cinema to reveal a persistence o alternate desires in Iranian culture. Tis re-coding o “straight” �lms as queer is not simply a private practice with a discrete semiotics: queer appropriation contaminates a wider cultural perception o popular cinema. Queer �lm criticism has always had to address the question o how to de�ne the boundaries o queerness across a perplexing multitude o texts and audiences. Yet another approach to queer �lm methodology is a textual ocus that de�nes queer �lms as those that depict queer people diegetically. Although Introduction
|
9
Fig. �.5: In Kajitu, shooting through a glass apple produces strikingly graphic abstract images.
we will be closely concerned with all manner o queer �gures and representations, a de�nition that demands representations o queers excludes artists who work in other registers and orecloses on the queerly expressive potential o cinematic sounds and images. For instance, an experimental �lm such as Kajitu/Some Days Ago (Nakamura akehiro, 2008) is largely abstract in its images, but by shooting through a glass ball it enables the spectator to see the queer potential o the lens to trans�gure nature by warping normative regimes o visuality (�gure I.5). Film scholars are alive to the queer potential o abstraction. Juan Suárez, or example, persuasively writes on queer textures, grain, and glitter in the American underground �lms o Jack Smith, as well as the political radicality o color-saturated tropicalist style in the work o the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica.�� In a different vein, Song Hwee Lim analyzes sai Ming-liang’s “undoing o anthropomorphic realism, which partly explains why his representations (o queer sexuality, or example) are not always amenable to identity politics.” For Lim, sai’s characteristic artcinematic quality o temporal drif sustains a queer representational logic ound as much in the relationship o stillness to movement as it is in gay characters.�� Tese examples illustrate the signi�cance o queer abstraction in histories o art cinema and the avant-garde, but they also insist on the 10
|
Introduction
limits o a politics o representation and on queer cinema’s participation in what Rey Chow terms “the radical implications o cinema’s interruption o the human as such.”�� A �nal possibility or de�nition lies in thinking queer cinema in terms o its staging o sexuality, gendered embodiment, and nonheteronormative sex. eresa de Lauretis’s memorable attempt to de�ne queer textuality insists that queerness inheres in a ormal disruption o reerentiality at the level o the signi�er and, urther, that “a queer text carries the inscription o sexuality as something more than sex.”�� De Lauretis is attempting to balance a semiotic account o queerness’s anti-normative potential that would ocus on its decentering o dominant regimes o representation with an anxiety that such abstraction might lose sight o a crucial link to dissident sexuality. Her “something more” speaks to eminist theory’s account o cinema as an apparatus o desire, endlessly reconstituting what Jacqueline Rose called sexuality in the �eld o vision. Cinematic images o desiring bodies cannot be thought without attention to this apparatus. Queer �lm theory is always a eminist project or us, and this book maintains a deep investment in cinema as a principal technology o gender and sexuality. De Lauretis’s use o the word “sex” here speaks at once o sex acts and o a resistance to the binary o sexual difference; hence, it may include queer genders, such as genderqueer and trans experience. Limiting our ocus to sex acts as a necessary quality o textual queerness, de Lauretis allows us to address a crucial tension that is revealed when we propose sex as a determining acet o queer cinema. On the one hand, representation o same-sex or other dissident sex acts is or many spectators a de�ning pleasure o queer cinema. Te gay Filipino melodrama Walang Kawala/No Way Out (Joel Lamangan, dir., 2008), or instance, quite sel-consciously interrupts its narrative or a slow-motion montage in �ashback o its central couple having sex. Tat sex sells is not exactly news, but the organization o cinema’s sexual pleasures can help us understand the affective orce o queer �lm cultures. Deborah Shaw has pointed out that sometimes we go to movies because we really want to see two girls kissing, and this deceptively simple idea discloses the potential o the erotic to remake the cinematic desire machine.�� A �lm such as Te Hunger (ony Scott, dir., 1983) may not seem queer in the way de Lauretis intends, but its iconic sex scene circulates in the lesbian cultural imaginary in ways that go beyond the limits o the �lm’s narrative. Its queer andom is well documented.�� More recently, Campbell X’s Stud Lie (2012) includes scenes o lesbian sex that challenge cinematic conventions o gender expression and embodiment. In their eroticized depiction o the top and bottom Introduction
|
11
Fig. �.6: Stud Life’s sex scenes illustrate the cinematic potential of showing sex.
dynamic and ���� power exchange, these scenes assert the political necessity o queer monstration. Here, the political aim o extending representation beyond mainstream antasies about white emme lesbians is achieved in and through sex acts: cinema’s ability to show sex tethers the voyeuristic pleasures o erotic spectacle to the counterpublic logic o visibility. Te titular stud is butch, black, kinky, and located not in a bourgeois antasy space but in working-class London. As in the same director’s erotic short Fem (2007), Stud Lie’s camera appears most con�dent and comortable when it displays the emme body and embodies the butch gaze. Both �lms succeed in their most sexually explicit sequences because they make the viewer resee the black lesbian body (�gure I.6). On the other hand, the demand that queer �lms depict sex acts also risks endorsing a Western cultural privileging o visibility and publicness. Tis impetus can be linked to neocolonial representational impulses that imperiously call or the exposure o the ethnic other as a queer body open to colonization by the West. Non-Western or nontraditional sexualities may not always are well when viewed through a Western lens o visibility. Queer �lm scholarship has always been attentive to practices o not showing, rom Patricia White’s writing on invisibility to Catherine Grant’s reading o the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza/Te Headless Woman (2008), which reveals the �lm’s queerness not in any overt visioning o sex but, instead, in its raming and looking relations.�� Ann Cvetkovich outlines the geopolitics 12
|
Introduction
Fig. �.7: Girlfriend, Boyfriend couples queer intimacy to political rebellion.
o this issue, stating that “it has been extremely important or queer studies to move across historical and geographic boundaries, away rom the recent history o gay and lesbian identities and communities in the Western metropolis. In such contexts, what counts as (homo)sexuality is unpredictable and requires new vocabularies; affect may be present when overt orms o sexuality are not.”�� As an attempt to reute a Western optical regime, Cvetkovich’s shif to affect proves crucial when raming queer cinema globally. o illustrate this point, consider the aiwanese historical drama Girl riend, Boyriend (Yang Ya-che, dir., 2012), in which gay desires between two school riends are registered insistently but not explicitly alongside a political narrative o student protest. Te �lm is set in 1985, when aiwan is under martial law, and the draconian discipline o the school allegorizes the country’s repressive polity. Rebellious Aaron has had his head shaved as punishment or speaking out, locating bodily shame as a locus o political control. In one scene, Aaron and his riend Liam sit together intimately, touching arms, while kids dance with sparklers behind them. Aaron says, “One person dancing alone is a rebellion, but i the whole school dances together, that’s the will o the people.” He draws a ake tattoo on Liam’s arm, writing, “We are waves welling up rom the same ocean.” Queer intimacies are here linked to rebellious aiwanese nationalism, and both a political sense o solidarity and a queer desire are written—literally—on the body. Te moment is replete with affect, but its desire will not turn into visible sex. Instead, queer revolutionary hope and the nostalgic evocation o teenage desires �ow into a radical narrative o aiwanese history, replete with the potential and losses o the democracy movement (�gure I.7). Introduction
|
13
Girlriend, Boyriend exempli�es a queer affective structure in which
cinema theorizes a relationship between spectator and screen, between the individual and the collective, or, in other words, between subjectivity and historical change. Queer cinematic affect can emerge in the political jouissance o capturing how non-normative sex eels, but it can equally harness the lie worlds o queer eelings whose relationship to the body and its acts travel along other pathways. Tere is thus a structuring tension in thinking queer world cinema between a reticence to reiy certain regimes o sexual representation and the counter impulse to value cinema’s monstrative potential to show queer sex. I this tension is to be productive, we may need to expand de Lauretis’s terms and think o sexuality in queer cinema as potentially more than, less than, or sometimes exactly coterminous with sex. I queer cinema cannot depend on queer characters, directors, representations, or audiences, how can it be speci�ed? We return to Eve Kososky Sedgwick’s universalizing and minoritizing discourses to think through the trouble with de�ning queer cinema.�� A universalizing discourse takes as axiomatic that it is helpul to think universally; that understanding the systems, structures, and discourses o “queer cinema” is a necessary �rst step or any critical analysis. In this reading, just as it would be restrictive to view world cinema as simply the accretion o �lms rom different countries, with no regard or circuits and systems o power, it is similarly limiting to think queer cinema as merely a collection o queer-oriented texts. Tis is precisely the trap set by the questions o category outlined earlier. However, a minoritizing discourse reminds us o the need or speci�city. oo ofen, universalizing concepts reiterate dominant power structures, whether o gay male culture, mainstream taste categories, or neo-imperialism. Minoritizing discourse insists on both the cultural heterogeneity and the radical impulses o ���� cultures, redirecting research away rom what is already amiliar. Just as Sedgwick reuses to choose between these modes o thought, we resist taxonomizing logics that are always at once too broad and too narrow. In place o a neat de�nition o queer cinema, we propose a radically promiscuous approach, and we insist that our polemic can be ound in the logic o a capacious corpus. We are unwilling to relinquish the category o queer to charges that openness equals conceptual looseness and a dissipation o power. In act, we believe that capaciousness is necessary so as not to determine in advance what kinds o �lms, modes o production, and reception might qualiy as queer or do queer work in the world. Tus, this book analyzes unpredictable intersections o queer plus cinema plus world, jostling 14
|
Introduction
side by side eminist videos, trashy heist movies, modernist art �lms, and homophobic melodramas. We maintain a radical openness on the question o what queer �lms might look like and where we might �nd them. Such an openness makes several related political claims: • It understands the orce o queerness as active across the �eld o cinema, so it reuses to draw bright lines between ���� �lms and queer �lms or between positive and negative representations o queer living, or to stipulate particular modes o identi�cation or �lmmakers. • It contains a theory o what constitutes the cinematic: we acknowledge how diffuse the cinematic has become but insist on its generative potential across platorms, viewing protocols, and institutional contexts. We do not limit queer cinema to traditional theatrical settings or to commercial production. • It demands that we locate queerness not only in ormally transgressive �lms (which privilege certain culturally dominant canons o world cinema) but equally in popular, debased, and generic orms. • Conversely, it leaves open the possibility that experimental and nonrepresentational image practices speak in politically coherent ways and offer socially relevant insight to the lives o queer people. • It draws on queer theory but does not limit queer cinema to those �lmmakers with access to or investment in Western theories o sexuality and gender. • It takes part in an anti-imperialist stance that de-privileges the Western queer �lm canon and works to upend Eurocentric ways o thinking cinema. • It resists hierarchies o production value, taking seriously cheaply made �lms and the political economy o perpetually minoritized audiences. Many o the �lms we discuss escape the conventional tripartite divisions o First, Second, and Tird Cinemas and thus offer important correctives to the constitution o contemporary world cinema. • It approaches the cinema image as meaning in motion and thus recognizes an inherent semantic instability in even the most overt representations o sex. In constructing our corpus, then, we asked an apparently simple question: where in the world is queer cinema? We �nd the locations o queer cinema to be particularly ruitul sites o negotiation: since there is little inrastructure devoted exclusively to the exhibition o queer �lm or media, a provisional inventory o the spaces—whether bricks and mortar or imagined communities—in Introduction
|
15
which queer cinema happens can help elucidate the existence o queer cinema in the world. Queer cinema is conventionally ound at the �lm estival or in art-house theaters, but it is also to be ound in mainstream theaters and in local language-based markets. Its history includes the community center, the porn theater, and the lesbian potluck. Queer cinema is certainly to be ound in the video store, which Lucas Hilderbrand has argued orms both an archive and an affective community, constituted in the degradations o tapes paused and rewound hundreds o times.�� It is ound in bootlegging and tape-sharing communities; on bit torrent sites; in pirated video ��s in China; in underground ��� markets in Iran and Egypt; among gray-market distributors; in queer movie clubs in Croatia organized on Facebook; and at market stalls in Nigeria, Mexico, and Vietnam. It is ound through specialist distributors such as Peccadillo and ��� Video; and in video-on-demand (���) sites targeted to queer and diasporic audiences. Finally, queer cinema �ourishes on social media, on video- sharing sites such as Youube and Vimeo. Te online economy o queer cinema is heterogeneous. Youube hosts serious transnational web series such as Te Pearl o Arica (Johnny von Wallström, dir., 2014), a Swedish documentary about the Ugandan trans activist Cleopatra Kombugu, but it is, o course, also the home o an-made supercuts o same-sex kisses in Tai movies and off-air recordings o older gay movies such as Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988). Many o the popular South Asian and Southeast Asian �lms we analyze are more easily accessed on Youube or through �le-sharing sites than on ���. Te social media �lm distribution company Distriy illustrates how the industry is catching up with online circulation, but it also provides telling insights into how queer cinema is moving in the world. Embedded in Facebook or on ���� websites, Distriy enables international audiences to share links, view trailers, stream entire �lms, and access local cinema listings. Films can be rented in 150 countries, paid or in twenty-three currencies, and viewed in eight languages. Te company tracks clicks as a way to broker distribution deals and cites the views o Nigerian �lms by Nigerian diasporic audiences as an example o a demographic it learned about through this kind o analysis.�� Even as the �rst wave o queer ���, such as Busk, disappears, new models o international mobility are emerging. By broadening the �eld o inquiry in this way, we aim to respond to the call o many �lm scholars, who ask, as Ramon Lobato puts it, “Where is contemporary cinema located, and how is it accessed?”�� Lobato himsel begins to answer that question by arguing that “ormal theatrical exhibition is no 16
|
Introduction
longer the epicenter o cinema culture.”�� Instead, he argues or our attention to be turned to the unregulated, ungoverned, and largely unstudied means by which �lms travel to and among viewers. Lobato contends that studying world cinema requires ocusing on “inormal distribution,” which includes pirating, covert �le sharing, bootlegging, gray-market trading, and so on. When these practices are seen together as an inormal economy o �lm consumption, they constitute neither a niche nor a marginal market. Instead, the inormal economy is “the key driver o distribution on a global scale” and must be central to the study o cinema. �� I, as Lobato argues, “inormal circulation has not shown up in our data sets and research rameworks because they have been calibrated in a way that renders these movements invisible,” then we might say that the industrial �lm historian has been doubly blinded to queer cinema (and its audiences). Tis is the case, �rst, because queer cinema has been long excised rom offi cial records and public exhibition (due to the application o obscenity standards and other institutions o homophobia), and second, because it has been largely consumed inormally via secret networks, delivered in plain envelopes and shared through bootlegging networks.�� It is helpul, then, to consider alongside queer cinema’s many material and virtual spaces the equally revealing list o some o the places where queer cinema is not. Despite the prolieration o screens (on trains, in hospital rooms, on the street) characteristic o the contemporary media landscape, we rarely see queer images in these public spaces. In many locations, state censorship means that cinemas, public libraries, and online ser vices are allowed no ���� content. Queer �lms may be sequestered in video stores and ��� stalls, available only to those who ask the right questions. Tey may be categorized with porn in online rental sites, hidden behind paywalls or age restrictions. Google’s auto-�ll eature blacklists many gay-oriented search terms, making queer searching incrementally more diffi cult. Some cell phone companies block ���� sites, locking down the queer portions o the web. Areas that are underserved by digital projection or without high-speed Internet connections may lack access even to popularly circulating gay movies. Although the Internet has expanded the media texts available to many people, including those living in repressive regimes, we have been careul to recognize how a Western middle-class sense o availability can shape the terms o access. Even Lobato cautions against privileging “internet users and patterns o activity most commonly ound in the USA and other �rst world nations.”�� Daniel Herbert writes, “I we take it that ‘�lm’ is a particular technology or the capture and presentation o moving images, and that ‘cinema’ Introduction
|
17
more broadly describes the social arrangements through which moving images are produced, circulated, and consumed, then over the last several decades, cinema has not ‘died’ but rather prolierated and transormed.” �� Queer cinema by necessity has been at the oreront o this transormation, but it is also imperiled by institutionalized and ofen state-sanctioned homophobia. For instance, the paucity o committed queer �lm archives and university collections renders the preservation and circulation o queer cinema precarious. Te explosion o political spaces online must be weighed against the seemingly boundless encroachment o surveillance and against the covert degradation o the public sphere in its migration to corporatized social media platorms. Queerness is thus complexly embedded in the spaces o world cinema, and, we propose, it plays an intrinsic part in its development. We primarily ocus on contemporary queer cinema, rom the 1990s onward, a choice that enables us to consider closely the historical situation o globalization and the orms o worldliness that have emerged in this period. Yet we want to complicate a notion o queer cinema that considers only its most recent maniestations, with Barbara Mennel contextualizing the current “explosion” o queer cinema historically.�� Tere is a danger in supposing that queer cinema goes global only in the contemporary era, leaving the rest o the world presumptively heterosexual until the effects o Western-style globalization enable a queer cultural discourse. By contrast, our account o cinema as an inherently queer medium asks readers to think about �lm history as always already queer. We turn to key international queer �lmmakers, theorists, and texts rom earlier eras to demonstrate how much contemporary world cinema builds on the queer histories embedded in the medium. Even the most conventional histories o cinema are replete with queers, rom F. W. Murnau and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Dorothy Arzner and Lucrecia Martel. Tus, we consider Sergei Eisenstein, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and oshio Matsumoto to be important interlocutors rom the Soviet Union, Italy, and Japan, respectively, as are groundbreaking queer-themed �lms such as Ba wang bie ji/Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, dir., 1993) rom China and La Cruel Martina/Te Cruel Martina (Juan Miranda, dir., 1989) rom Bolivia. So in the same way that Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe asks readers to reorient their understanding o the world without reerence to Europe as a center, we rerame world cinema both without privileging Europe and without a presumption o heterosexuality as a determinant o the cinematic experience.�� Queer Cinema in the World argues that cinema has always been queer and thus that the worlds made by cinema have al18
|
Introduction
ways been queer worlds. What would �lm history look like i we oriented ourselves to �lms such as Fukujusô /Pheasant Eyes (Jirô Kawate, dir., 1935), a Japanese silent �lm about same-sex desire between two sisters-in-law? Romit Dasgupta points out the way in which this �lm pre�gures Deepa Mehta’s Fire, locating lesbian desire in a domestic setting and turning to amilial intimacies as a place where women might �nd ul�llment beyond the strictures o marriage.�� Te �lm was based on a story written by Nobuko Yoshiya, who lived with her emale partner, and yet even recently her amily did not agree to reprint her work in a lesbian collection. Both textually and extratextually, Pheasant Eyes creates queer spaces, but the heteronormatizing institutions o amily and �lm historiography constantly threaten its visibility. Across both time and space, queer narratives can create contiguities and affinities; it requires renewed attention to see the shapes o this queer cinematic world. Returning to the present, we argue that queer cinema makes new orms o worldliness visible, thinkable, and malleable. Te spectacular growth o queer �lmmaking and queer �lm consumption around the world in the mid-1990s occurred in parallel with the supposed death o cinema. Far rom being exhausted, cinema has emerged as a privileged platorm or articulating queer experiences o and responses to globalization. An evocative example o queer cinema’s symbolic labor in the world can be ound among the activities ���� activists in Indonesia created to observe the International Day against Homophobia (�����) in 2008. Alongside public discussion, street actions, and a radio appearance, the group People like Us—Satu Hati (�����) took an ambulant medical clinic to Pantai Sundak, a village on the south coast o Java. As the Indonesian ���� network reported, “Te group went there together with a medical clinic team while distributing rice, milk powder, second-hand clothes and school supplies. Tey staged a playback show and even screened the �lm Iron Ladies as an educational tool. Te villagers were delighted and became sensitized o ���� issues along the way.”�� Satree lek/Te Iron Ladies (Yongyoot Tongkongtoon, dir., 2000) will be discussed in chapter 4, but what stands out or us here is both the use o a Tai popular trans sports movie in Indonesia as part o a globalized anti-homophobia campaign, and the apparently disjunctive combination o cinema with urgent medical needs in a location that is ill served by the state. O course, as we have seen, such global transits are not always positive: the worldliness o cinematic space is highly contested and requently instrumentalized or reactionary politics—but never with any completeness. So although we maintain some cynicism toward world cinema as a category, we are reluctant to dismiss it as a neoliberal renemy. Introduction
|
19
What is so curious about queer global �lm culture is the persistence o the idea o cinema as an effective means o worlding and o participating in the world politically. In an era in which many take instant digital interconnectivity or granted, why is this old medium still understood as a key means o worlding, o connecting to global politics, and o experiencing the category o the human? Why do queers still go to movies? Cinema persists in queer culture as a site o political erment, a volatile public stage on which protest can be expressed and ideas disseminated. It also provides spaces in which to nourish more diffuse experiences o affinity, belonging, and intimacy, where spectatorship provokes the ormation o unexpected collisions and coalitions. We might consider Hei yan quan/I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (sai Ming-liang, dir., 2006), where intersecting narratives o bisexual longing and belonging end off the otherwise precarious realities o globalization, immigrant labor, and transnational identities in contemporary Malaysia. It is the queerness o these connections that makes the terms o intimacy and the exigencies o world politics speak to one other. Or we could point to a popular �lm such as Memento Mori (Kim ae-yong and Min Kyu-dong, dirs., 1999), which transorms the key generic elements o the globally popular East Asian horror �lm (longing, dystopic melancholy, surreal but extreme violence) into lesbian drama, making the genre suddenly seem inseparable rom same-sex desire. Te vitality o these conversations demonstrates that cinema remains a necessary instrument or seeing the world differently and also or articulating different worlds. In the World
Inherent in our project is a complex and delicate mapping o what queerness signi�es—or cinema and or international public cultures more broadly. Te term has been sometimes embraced but equally ofen contested by activists around the world. For instance, Robert Kulpa, Joanna Mizielińska, and Agata Stasińska have argued that Western-style queer theory has a neoimperialist quality that limits understandings o radical practice in Poland. Still, they end by insisting, “We are queer. Locally.” �� racing this con�icted relationship to “queer” in every community in the world is impossible, but we are closely attentive to the ways in which the term resonates, or is adapted, transormed, or repudiated altogether, in different localities and cultural contexts. It is widely used in untranslated English orm—or instance in Queer Lisboa, the Lisbon �lm estival, and in Hong Kong, where the popular website Queer Sisters advocates or lesbians. We can hear it in local vernaculars, too: in urkey, “queer” becomes kuir , and in mainland China, 20
|
Introduction
it is transliterated into ku’er (). In aiwan and Hong Kong, a more common translation o queer is , meaning cool and different.�� Each o these apparently simple translations conceals a complex labor o appropriation, adaptation, and transormation. o return to Eastern Europe, we can see two politically different approaches in art and activist culture. Zvonimir Dobrovic, ormer head o the Queer Zagreb �lm estival sees queer as directly translatable, arguing that the estival “made queer an accepted term in Croatia.”�� By contrast, the organizers o the Queer Beograd Festival both use and transorm the term, turning the English “queer” into the Serbian kvar : In Serbian there is no word that means queer, no way to say what we mean about queer being more than ���� equality. For us queer means radical, inclusive, connecting to all kinds o politics and being creative about how we live in this world. So our new estival is called “Kvar,” a technical term literally translating to mean “a malunction in a machine,” because in this world o capitalism, nationalism, racism, militarism, sexism and homophobia, we want to celebrate ourselves as a malunction in this machine.�� At stake or each is a politics o the national that implicitly theorizes the relationship o the nation to the world. Dobrovic’s sense o Croatia joining a preexisting and progressive world o queers (via the �lm estival) is complicated by the Belgrade collective’s writing o local, post-Yugoslav, antinationalist, and antiglobalization politics into the project o queer destabilization. Te vernaculars o the word “queer” thus recursively stage precisely the issues we see as animating our project: the word speaks to the radical potential and internationalist impulses, as well as to the geopolitical hierarchies and imperialist orces, bound up in world cinema’s spaces. A central goal o Queer Cinema in the World is simultaneously to take care when deploying the word “queer” politically and not to dodge the more promiscuous applications o that label. We stand with those activists and theorists who resist efforts to impose Western models o gender and sexual lie on communities and people who de�ne themselves otherwise. At the same time, we have reservations about seemingly anti-imperialist approaches that can oreclose on queer discursive space and thus inadvertently deem the whole world always already straight.�� It is crucial to maintain both modes o critique, as the world is always in the process o being made. Over-speciying what counts as queer can place an unair burden on those living in non-heterosexual and gender-dissident ormations, and our use o Introduction
|
21
the term is sel-consciously open-ended. Puar posits queerness as a potential counterorce to the liberal discourses o the global, insisting that “queerness irreverently challenges a linear mode o conduction and transmission: there is no exact recipe or a queer endeavor, no a priori system that taxonomizes the linkages, disruptions, and contradictions into a tidy vessel.”�� Our use o queer as a conceptual rubric is thus intended as a way into a volatile discursive �eld rather than as an a priori claim. o ask whether globalization enables the queer to emerge as a universal �gure or whether queer �lms can be ound in every national cinema is, we consider, a �awed approach that begs a series o questions about sexuality, gender, and the spaces o the world. At the start o the article “In Search o Sensibilities: Te International Face o Gays on Film,” published in the gay magazine Maniest in 1983, Penni Kimmel describes an occupational hazard o being a �lm critic: “Film re viewers are notoriously greedy. Gay �lm reviewers . . . can get positively grabby.”�� Across the article, Kimmel looks or what she sees as “a de�nite gay sensibility” in many o the �lms shown at that year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, but she does so while mocking her own impulses as a Western critic trying to establish that queer �lm is in the world. “Was there enough gay sensibility to be ound in the celluloid o Upper Volta?” she writes. “Would lesbian love �oat across the [Iron] Curtain or over the [Berlin] Wall?”�� What does count as gay or Kimmel is surprisingly heterogeneous: a documentary on Montgomery Clif, a �lm about child abuse, a docudrama on sexually transmitted diseases that eatures naked men. She is also attuned to how the spaces created by the �lm estival’s events amend and extend the political lie o these �lms and the project o world cinema. For example, Harry Belaonte’s autobiographical �lm triggered a discussion o the “persecution o gays in Cuba” to which the neither Cuban nor queer (though Caribbean and gay-allied) Belaonte replied, “All art is political. People are responsible or each other; we must protect the rights o all human beings. . . . Te question is how do you politically use the art?” In that context, Kimmel notes distinctions between engaged �lms that enable a queer reading and more directly political �lms that banish “homophilia” as i homosexuality were merely “a sophisticated peacetime luxury.” Tis snapshot o a Western critic’s “world cruise or �lms to jolt the rods and the cones and the grey matter and still leave me eeling wonderul with the world” suggests how the search or queer �lms has ofen been a means o mapping the world. We might connect Kimmel’s grabbiness to an imperialist or neocolonial project, one that appropriates difference as yet another acet o its own 22
|
Introduction
methodological sel-awareness. A contemporary version o this might be the encyclopedic volume L’homosexualité au cinéma by Didier Roth-Bettoni, which attempts to “englobe” a hitherto uncollected global history o more than �ve thousand ���� �lms rom all continents. Tis ambitious project nonetheless alls into some neocolonial traps when speaking o the naiveté o Arican �lms or the “obvious” taboo o homosexuality in the Arab world.�� However, we could equally see Kimmel’s discussion as presaging more politically engaged readings o world cinema. For instance, Gopinath’s “scavenger” approach emulates a diasporic spectator who crosses geopolitical and historical boundaries in reading non-normative desires on-screen. Gopinath’s technique itsel builds on another version o queer appropriation—that o Patricia White’s “retrospectatorship”—which reminds us that appropriation has been a necessary practice or queers that reaches not only to other parts o the world but also across time.�� A cliché retold about the 1990s model o queer cultural studies is that as a hermeneutic, it overly appropriated texts, objects, attitudes, and historical �gures to queer. It was too grabby. Tese seemingly overeager appropriative acts de�ned the verb “to queer.” oday in the humanities, a backlash has taken hold, and promiscuous queering can sometimes be seen as old-ashioned and misguided. Indeed, the backlash has succeeded in suggesting that all queer critical practices are in�ected with a looseness o de�nition and critical object. In act, these queer perspectives are now ofen marginalized by an undue burden o proo, which seems indirectly to reinorce the always already heterosexual imperatives o dominant descriptions o world history. Heterosexual patriarchy is a world system that naturalizes its own dominance and ar-reaching prolieration as a theory o human lie.�� When we look back to the 1990s, the appropriation o the word “nation” by “queer nation” was not a nationalist or homonationalist endeavor. It was an aggressive re-coding strategy based on the sheer impossibility o imagining a world in which queerness could be a culturally productive orce. As Sarah Schulman reminds us, it brought together an otherwise impossible pairing o words.�� In writing this book, we have resisted thinking that heterogeneity—or bringing together impossible terms—is a problem. We are not ready to give up on the possibility o reimagining a world that would be useul to more than just a tiny percentage o its inhabitants. We believe that non-Western cinemas o sexual and gender dissidence may be one place rom which that world can be reimagined. Borrowing rom Ernst Bloch, we replace the homogenous vision o the “crackless world picture” with the “never closed” utopian impulse that “breaks into lie when the varnish cracks.”�� We remain Introduction
|
23
politically committed to resisting the lure o totalities while reusing to reduce queer cultural practices to minoritized particularity. One o the challenges o writing the book has been balancing the grabby tendency o the (usually) Western critic while not giving up on the world. On the one hand, non-Western �lmmakers offer revised de�nitions o the world, distinctly different rom either those o world cinema studies or those o commodity capitalism in the global North. But on the other hand, non-Western texts can warn o the dangers o grabbiness—and that critique needs also to be showcased. In commodity globalism, a plethora o choices is a simulacrum o difference, in which everything carries the same exchangeable value. Insoar as cinema is intertwined in the systems o global capital, it always risks such rei�cation. Rey Chow describes contemporary culture as “caught up in . . . global visibility—the ongoing, late-capitalist phenomenon o mediatized spectacularization, in which the endeavor to seek social recognition amounts to an incessant production and consumption o onesel and one’s group as images on display.”�� Similarly, Sean Cubitt takes up a critical position on dominant modes o cinematic worlding when he argues that “cosmopolitanism corresponds to inormationalization because it operates in only one direction. Te cosmopolitan is at home in the culture o the other, but he does not offer the other the hospitality o his own home.”�� We will see this compulsive visualization o the other at work when we consider the con�icted cinematic discourses o queer multiculturalism in chapter 1. We insist, however, that this is not the only possible vision o the world and that cinema has long been embedded in—yet in tension with—the systems o global capital. Some recent accounts o cosmopolitanism offer valuable insight or theorizing queer cinema, even as they speak in quite a different register. In his in�uential book on the concept, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, Tere are two strands that intertwine in the notion o cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties o kith and kind, or even the more ormal ties o a shared citizenship. Te other is that we take seriously the value not just o human lie but o particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and belies that lend them signi�cance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn rom our differences.�� Tis passage is, to us, strongly reminiscent o Sedgwick’s oundational axiom that “people are different rom one another,” a way o thinking queerness 24
|
Introduction
and the human to which we return in chapter 1. Tis textual affi liation (albeit probably an unintentional iteration) opens up what processes o worlding can offer us against their more elitist, globalizing maniestations. Pheng Cheah rejects what he calls a “acile cosmopolitanism,” which he aligns with market capitalism, and against which he proposes a “more rigorous . . . modality o cosmopolitanism, that is responsible and responsive to the need to remake the world as a hospitable space, that is, a place that is open to the emergence o peoples that globalization deprives o world.” �� Although we do not adhere closely to the discourse o the cosmopolitan, it is this attempt to remake the world as a place open to those currently deprived o world that motivates this project. When we analyze queer �lms in terms o their worldliness, then, we aim to describe what it is that texts create as they intervene in worlding processes. Dudley Andrew writes, “In cinema, something as technical as ‘point o view’ asserts an ideological and political claim, literally orienting a culture to a surrounding world.”�� For Andrew, every �lm brings into being a perspective on the world, a way o looking that rames social and affective space. His understanding o point o view here is ormal but never merely technical: it tells us something important about the �lm’s world, but that thing is not quanti�able in the way that global capital wants to capture all human activity. We cannot, or example, measure the colonial gaze in La Noire de . . . / Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, dir., 1966). Rather, point o view or Andrew provokes thought and calls or analysis. In a similar vein, we argue that every �lm constructs a world ormally and that this worldliness has the capacity to recalibrate its own parameters. Worldliness can shif the terms o agency and power and has the ability to create effects in the world. Queer Cinema in the World investigates how queer �lms intersect with shifing ideas o global politics and world cinema aesthetics in order to open out queer cinema’s potential to disturb dominant modes o world making. Te book does not aim to provide a complete overview o global queer cinema, but neither does it completely surrender the idea o the world to globalization. Instead, it makes a case or the centrality o queerness in what we understand as world cinema and or the signi�cance o cinema in making queer worlds. Te worldliness o cinema is highly contested space, ought afer and instrumentalized in politically suspect ways. But the cooptation o cinematic worlds to neocolonial antasies and consumer capitalist effects is never achieved with completeness. Te dynamics o cinema allow experiences that transcend pragmatism, and the utility o cinema or political ends is always accompanied by a radical instability. So while we maintain cynicism toward Introduction
|
25
the canonization o a category called “world cinema,” we are also reluctant to relinquish all cinema that poses worldly questions. Despite the success o global market-driven capitalism in systematizing the world, we insist that neoliberalism does not get to own the world. In our individual and collective endeavors, we have listened to other ways o de�ning the world. For this reason, the essay we co-wrote in our anthology Global Art Cinema put orward the idea o “the impurity o art cinema” to reignite the potencies and instabilities o what we elt had become a category o �lm—arthouse are— that was too easily dismissed by �lm scholars as decadent, overly aesthetic, and inherently compromised.�� o use the term “global” is always a political act and yet ew o us can opt out o being subject to the world. We resist a critique that would see any and all renderings o the world as inescapably complicit with globalization. We are also concerned by an almost kneejerk unwillingness to discuss queers and the world together. In �lm studies, a critical awareness o the global rame has challenged and revised the traditional rubrics o �lm studies (in�ecting them with categories such as the transnational, diasporic, the exilic, and migrancy) but these debates have ofen marginalized or excluded queer �lm. Queer Cinema in the World opens out conversations between critical models o queer worlding and rubrics o world cinema. Te challenge is to think critiques o the global gaze/gays alongside Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s view o European spectators as “armchair conquistadors”; to read the racializing logic o the gay international against Fatimah obing Rony’s account o the “third eye”; to compare homonationalism with Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism; and to add White’s retrospectatorship to Dudley Andrew’s phases o world cinema.�� Bringing these perspectives together is also our attempt to correct what we see as an avoidance o queer theory by �lm studies and �lm theory. Even many o the canonical studies o queer cinema speak apart rom queer theory’s most signi�cant challenges to categories o identity, affect, lie, and aesthetics. We propose that when thought together, these intellectual traditions rethink the world rom the ground up. Tey simultaneously ask: what do we mean by a world? Do we need a world? I so, why? Is it politically necessary to imagine the scale/space o human living in global terms? In other words, what is having a world good or? Scales of Worldliness
Andrei arkovsky asks, “Why do people go to the cinema?” and concludes that this impulse springs rom “the human need to master and know the world.”�� Our impetus in oregrounding this question comes rom our con26
|
Introduction
viction, contrary to arkovsky’s, that people use cinema to know the world without mastering it. For another Soviet �lmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, the question o the world was also a question o cinema, but the terms o its mastery were less certain. For Eisenstein, cinema collapses physical distance and temporal difference, perverting the proximities within which we ordinarily live. Its spatiality has little to do with what is physically contiguous; instead, Eisenstein’s politics o cinematic space was, as Mary Ann Doane has noted, a politics o scale.�� As she quotes Eisenstein, “Te representation o objects in the actual (absolute) proportions proper to them is, o course, merely a tribute to orthodox ormal logic. A subordination to an inviolable order o things. . . . Absolute realism is by no means the correct orm o perception. It is simply the unction o a certain orm o social structure.” �� As much as it has the potential to reinorce a social order, naturalizing a certain mode o perception, cinema or Eisenstein also has the potential to de-reiy perception by distorting scale. He alerts us to pay attention to how cinema recalibrates scale, because in that operation there is a politics o the world. We know that Eisenstein was keen to unlock cinema’s potential to collide spaces and times in order to bring down oppressive hierarchies and radically reorganize the world. We might even say that cinema or him is able to queer scale by perverting orthodox proximetrics, collapsing distances, and drawing together various and skewed perspectives. I all cinema plays with admixtures o scale (via composition, montage, and so on), then Eisenstein asks what world we are making when we make cinema. We draw on this reading o Eisenstein to think cinematic worldliness in terms o queer scales and spaces, juxtaposing his insights with those o recent queer �lm scholars who take on questions o globality. One such scholar is Helen Hok-Sze Leung, who positions the cinematic as a site in which alternate scales o political, social, and sexual identi�cation can occur. Leung, building on Gordon Brent Ingram, identi�es what she calls queerscapes in a “ ‘locality o contests’ between normative constitutions o identity and less acceptable orms o identi�cation, desire, and contact.”�� Leung lays out the potential or this intersection at an early stage in the debate when she argues that New Queer Cinema should engage Tird Cinema, to counter both ���’s dominant Western male point o view and the blind spot Tird Cinema ofen had or sexuality. She points to �lms such as Chou jue deng chang /Enter the Clowns (Cui Zi’en, dir., 2002), Fresa y chocolate/Strawberry and Chocolate (omás Gutiérrez Alea, dir., 1993), and Woubi Cheri (Laurent Bocahut and Philip Brooks, dirs., 1998) as examples o global �lms that are geopolitically queer: Introduction
|
27
It is clear that many new queer cinemas are emerging, rom the “margins and interstices” o global power. Tese �lms are “queer” not only in the sense that they explore sexual and gender practices outside o normative heterosexuality and the dichotomous gender system. Tey are queer— indeed more than a little strange—because they unsettle current notions o history and politics, while going against conventional paradigms o �lmmaking. Most o all, they answer to the legacies o Tird Cinema by remaining on the side o the disaffected and disenranchised.�� With Leung, we insist on a mode o cinematic queerness that links sexuality and gender both to textual transgression and to a politics o worldliness. As she writes, “Such a cinema would . . . engage with and resist the decentered and dispersed orms o late capitalist domination that operate transnationally and across different identity ormations. Tere are signs that a new wave o queer �lms, emerging rom diverse locales, are moving in precisely such a direction. Not only do these �lms explore non-normative sexualities and gender practices rom new perspectives, they do so by rendering strange— indeed queering—existent narratives o history and culture as well as the institution o �lmmaking.”�� Te structures and shapes o world cinema enable new orms o transnational articulation. One o these existing narratives is diaspora, which Gopinath redeploys as a means o mapping the vectors and transits o queer desires. Queer diasporic cinema allows us to see spaces o shared desire that are otherwise illegible. It also traverses historical boundaries, borrowing rom White’s concept o retrospectatorship. Tus, speaking o the Indian lesbian �lm Sancharram/Te Journey (Ligy J. Pullapally, dir., 2004), she writes: Te various genealogies that converge in a text like Sancharram can only be traced through . . . a queer diasporic rame, one that would allow us to read the multiple registers within which the �lm gains meaning: the local, the regional, the national, the diasporic, and the transnational. . . . Te �lm in effect supersedes a national rame; instead it interpolates a transnational lesbian and gay viewership in its raming o the struggle o its heroines through these transnational discourses. Sancharram thereore allows us to consider the ormation o a transnational lesbian/ eminist subject through the use o a regional linguistic and aesthetic idiom.�� Neither Leung nor Gopinath gives up on the idea o a spatial politics o transnational identi�cation. For both scholars, there is a political imperative con28
|
Introduction
tinually to think beyond one’s own community. In act, Gopinath explicitly offers her transregional subject as an alternative to the consumer capitalist subject that is ofen disparagingly called the “global gay.”�� Here we might connect Gopinath’s intervention to the practices o “sel-regioning” described in Cüneyt Çakırlar’s analysis o queer urkish experimental media. Çakırlar suggests that these sel-regioning practices conront the problematic appropriation o the regional, the authentic, or the local when art rom outside Western Europe travels. Gopinath, Leung, and Çakırlar propose queer transnational scales without sweeping the problems o cultural translation under the carpet o global gay identity. But at the same time, and in each o these approaches, the space o queer desire is not limited to a single cultural rame. Queer Cinema in the World takes three methodological interventions rom the work o these scholars. First, it understands cinema as a place where the politics o globalization are articulated and disarticulated. Cinema is a critical means by which queerness worlds itsel, a means by which queers negotiate local and global subjectivities. Tereore, to engage with the politics o global queerness, we must attend to its cinematicity. Tis process is legible at the level o individual �lms articulating the worldly in their orm and style. For example, Wusheng eng ling /Soundless Wind Chime (Kit Hung, 2009) �gures transnational queer desire via elliptical montages and sound bridges, graphic matches that link different times and spaces, and synthetic edits that align bodies via analogy rather than synchrony. We are interested in the spaces enabled by �lm orm and the geopolitical questions they pose, exploring how queerness grants �lm a spatiality that speaks dierently in the world. Second, we have taken inspiration rom the ways that Gopinath and Leung align disparate �lms and �lm practices. Leung’s bold move to think ��� alongside Tird Cinema shows how orceul it can be to juxtapose dissimilar spaces as a means o questioning the terms o their supposed incommensurability. We denaturalize the incongruences o different types o �lm because we are interested in �nding resistant means o living in the world. We are unwilling to relinquish the scaling o the world to its most reactionary ormations. Tis book thus looks to alternative scales, unusual linkages, and unexpected lineages. Tird, each o these scholars brings a new critical sensitivity to the politics o exhibition and the complex circuitry o distribution (official and unofficial) that enable queer �lms to be seen by various audiences. Gopinath, Leung, and Çakırlar understand watching a �lm to be a practice that reaches across disparate times and spaces, a sensorium in which audiences connect conventionally incommensurate moments, experiences, and Introduction
|
29
locations. We have privileged those queer �lms that partake in worlding in ways that neither obliterate difference nor make everything reconcilable to a single global sexual or political currency. We are determined to retain the scale o the worldly as a dialectical mode that enables difference to precipitate change in the world. Subjective Investments
We are aware o our own positionality in the world systems o cinema and queer culture. By certain reckonings o identity and power, we tread careully, or we write as two white, middle-class, cisgendered people working in elite Western universities. We are outsiders to many o the cultures we engage—and outsiders with some signi�cant privileges. O course, as world cinema scholars, we have a commitment to comparative research. Yet our speaking positions make a difference, and queer politics insists on the consequences o these differences. As Sedgwick notes in considering what she brought to an anti-homophobic project, identi�cations within lines o gender, sexuality, race, and so on require explanation every bit as much as those across de�nitional lines, and her different, vicarious cathexes to her subject inevitably shape the directions o analysis.�� For Sedgwick, in writing outside one’s own positionality in an anti-homophobic project, there is either no justi�cation needed or none possible. Tis is only the more true when the project is global in scope. Identities are complicated things, and as coauthors we bring many intertwined perspectives to the project. One o us is Jewish, while the other’s ather was born in Palestine. Both o us come rom culturally mixed immigrant backgrounds, and both o us have lived as immigrants. Both o us have a long-standing engagement in queer scholarship, and one o us was present at a oundational moment o queer �lm studies, the How Do I Look? symposium. Although we have different sexual orientations, both o us have had sex with men and with women. One o us rames their sexual identity in terms o ����. We both come rom politically active amilies. One o us has a history in early ���� activism, and the other in anti–Tird World debt activism. Tese terrains o subjectivity all play their parts in shaping our intellectual, aesthetic, and political commitments and have surely contributed to the place rom which we write. Tese positionalities provide, in one reading, a map o our political in vestments in gender, sexuality, and geopolitics, as well as a sense o why a queer endeavor that binds the intimate and subjective with the public and collective might be important to us. Our impulse to theorize queer cinema’s worldliness derives in large measure rom our commitment to reimagining 30
|
Introduction
the world. o some degree, this polemic emerges rom our desire to recon�gure what �lm studies names “world cinema.” Film studies has adopted the rubric o world cinema, as contested and contingent as that category may be. And yet queer cinema was remaking the world long beore we got to the �lm cultures described between this book’s covers. Troughout our collaborative research trips, screenings, and heated discussions, we have remained determined to avoid a kind o missionary impulse that we sometimes see in surveys o queer art and culture. We have not been on a mission to excavate new instances o queer sexualities around the world; nor should this book be seen as an argument or the existence o particular identity categories in particular locations. Rather, we note how queer cultures have long deployed cinema as a means o making and unmaking the world. We �nd a rich discursive terrain o debates around queer cinema worldwide, and yet, or some reason, mainstream �lm studies has remained reluctant to acknowledge the centrality o these discourses in the reinvigoration and reinvention o the political lie o the medium. Te book contains six chapters, each ocused on a different category drawn rom the apparatus o cinema. Te organization is deliberately not geographical: although we spend time on case studies that delve into particular national cultures, our logic is not that o the almanac or atlas. Instead, we �nd queerness across the lie worlds o the cinematic, attending to its existence in orms and structures that are not easily recognized by more conventional taxonomies o nation or genre. We proceed comparatively, staging encounters between �lms rom different places and in disparate cinematic modes. Te book’s de�nition o the world derives avowedly both rom �lm theory and rom the �lms themselves, and our conceptualization o the chapters speaks to a commitment to cinema’s capacity to reorganize the world. Chapter 1 centers on the �gure o the queer, considering how representations such as the bisexual sex worker, the trans exile, and the diasporic lesbian circulate in world cinemas. Our approach is not characterological; rather, it leverages these recurring tropes to get at some central problems or thinking contemporary queer worldliness. Here, we consider debates on homonationalism, neoliberal versions o globalization, and the concept o the global gay, analyzing how �lms construct geopolitically hierarchized positions rom which to look at racialized queer bodies. We consider the political value o such a critique and its limitations, opening out the multivalences contained in scenes o translation, dramas o the European queer Muslim, and romantic comedies made by lesbians o color. Introduction
|
31
Chapter 2 takes the institution as its organizing term. It examines the queer �lm estival, which provides a vantage point rom which to view cinema’s shifing role in world politics. In 1955, André Bazin offered an early theory o the international �lm estival, calling it “the very epitome o a worldly affair.”�� oday, queer �lm estivals are eager to proclaim both that queers make �lms more worldly and that �lms make the world more queer. We read the rise o globalized queer �lm estivals in the 1990s alongside the simultaneous emergence o international campaigns or the decriminalization o homosexuality. A close examination o the cultural practices o some �lm estivals, however, complicates this human rights rhetoric, exposing how dynamically these events reimagine public spaces and audiences. Moving away rom �lm texts to consider the material spaces, curatorial logics, publicity, and social media practices o the estival, chapter 2 proposes the queer �lm estival as a space o tension, at once operating in complicity with globalized capitalism and inaugurating alternative �gurations o queer lie. Chapter 3 ocuses on narrative and speci�cally deploys allegory as a way to reimagine what it means to speak in the world. Locating queer bodies at the heart o some canonical theories o political allegory, we argue that queerness is a constitutive part o imagining the world and that allegory is a central modality o its narration. We �nd allegory at work across geographically disparate sites o narrative cinema, rom contemporary classics o art cinema such as Fire and Sud pralad /ropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, dir., 2004) to crucial postcolonial texts such as Dakan/Destiny (Mohamed Camara, dir., 1997). Te chapter also reaches back historically to examine �ashpoints o queer �lm history such as Dog Day Afernoon (Sidney Lumet, dir., 1975) and Bara no sôretsu/Funeral Parade o Roses (oshio Matsumoto, dir., 1969), an experimental narration o Japanese modernity. Across these heterogeneous �lm texts, we propose allegory as a mode o queer worlding that intersects a politics o erasure with insistent utopian imaginaries that rerame the space o the public. Tis utopian strain in queer visual culture leads us to Chapter 4, which addresses the apparently contradictory idea o a queer popular. Queerness is that which destabilizes systems and norms; thus, it seems opposed to cultural normalcy. Yet what are we to make o wildly popular gay-themed �lms such as Te Parade, which earned practically the same box office in Serbia as Avatar (James Cameron, dir., 2009)? Tis chapter counters the need or a critical, antihomonormative queerness with popular cinema’s potential or unregulated pleasures and transgressive desires. We consider a range o popular genre �lms, rom Tai transgender sports �lms through comedies 32
|
Introduction
o tolerance and to actively homophobic genres such as Nigerian Christian melodrama. Tese readings demonstrate the complexity with which popular cinemas negotiate gender, sexuality, and globalization and suggest the radical potential or queerness to recon�gure the terms o the popular. Chapter 5 turns to the more elusive terrain o register, positing that cinema captures queer modes o belonging in the world by deploying eeling and affect. Te chapter deliberately brings together �lms with apparently mismatched registers o tone and cultural hierarchy, �nding resonance across disparate genres and modes o �lmmaking. We begin with melodrama, a register that is already overdetermined as queer. Te audiovisual regime o emotion and surace that characterizes melodrama has been central to queer cultural theories, and we consider the global implications o melodrama’s political affects in relation to Indian and Bangladeshi gay and transgender �lms. Te chapter moves on to elaborate registers o affiliation and proximity and queer experiences o sociality and community. It analyzes the queer historical drama and the politics o touch in activist documentary, and it considers space and nature as vectors o queer intimacy, rethinking concepts such as the pastoral and animality. Te �nal chapter addresses cinematic temporality, making the case that the disjunctures o queer history and subjectivity can be read in �lm orm and style. Te chapter outlines the queerly temporal trajectories o contemporary world cinema, analyzing excision and disruption, slowness and boredom, asynchrony and reproduction. It studies a wide range o international art �lms by directors such as Zero Chou, Julián Hernández, and Karim Aïnouz, as well as radical work by Jack Lewis and John Greyson and the melodramas o Lino Brocka. By insisting on the cinematicity o queer time, it rethinks the relationship between aesthetics and politics in queer theory and contemporary world cinema. Although our worldly scope could lead to accusations o a utopian internationalism, we do not propose a global cinematic language or even a global queer �lm style. However, we reuse to relinquish the world to equally antasmatic accounts o the medium that pose it as a sinister commodi�er o human lie and equalizer o experience. Cinema has always been more complicated than is allowed by simple analogies between those on the screen and those in ront o it. As we engage with both �lms and the transcultural politics that surround their exhibition, we have tried to remain attentive to how worlding is part o cinema’s apparatus. Universalism remains a crucial eature o cinema’s account o its own medium speci�city, and this longing has particular potencies and perils or queers. As much as om Cruise’s postapocalyptic Introduction
|
33
blockbusters and Jia Zhangke’s experiments with the limits o realist narration, queer �lms take advantage o cinema’s world-making power. Tey make the world visible or audiences, breaking down its otherwise impossible scales and interweaving disparate times and spaces. In act, a central contention o Queer Cinema in the World is that queer �lms produce orms o worldliness that are not anticipated by conventional worlding. While we note our positionality in relation to the categories listed earlier, we remain open to the other worlds that queer cinema imagines or its audiences, which may not be reducible to such categories and may never be de�ned in advance. Queer cinema, in other words, projects worlds that are otherwise unimagined and unimaginable.
34
|
Introduction
NOTES
Introduction
1. See Anna Vanzan, “Te ����� Question in Iranian Cinema: A Proxy Discourse?” Deportate, Esuli, Proughe 25 (2014): 45–55; Shima Houshyar, “Queer and rans Subjects in Iranian Cinema: Between Representation, Agency, and Orientalist Fantasies.” Ajam Media Collective, May 11, 2013, http://ajammc .com/2013/05/11/queer-and-trans-subjects-in-iranian-cinema-between -representation-agency-and-orientalist-antasies. 2. Te process o subtitling introduces layers o intertextuality that can be additive as much as distortive and orm a constitutive part o the experience o world cinema and its claims or universality. In chapter 1, we address the cinematic spaces created through subtitling more directly. See Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: ranslating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 2007); Atom Egoyan and Ian Balour, eds., Subtitles: On the Foreignness o Film (Cambridge, MA: ��� Press, 2004). 3. Te �lm’s harshest critics have pointed to the American accents with which the lead actors speak Farsi. Again, the �lm’s transnational and de- territorialized production seeps into the text as a politics o authenticity asking who may speak as Iranian. 4. See Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics o Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013); Pascale Casanova, Te World Republic o Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007; Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Tinking and Feeling beyond the
Nation (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 1998); Damrosch, What Is World Literature? ; Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Lef Review 1 (January–February 2000): 54–68; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era o Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012). 5. Jasbir Puar, errorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer imes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 6. Alexander Doty pursues a similar line o inquiry in Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Routledge, 2000). 7. Laura Mulvey, “Aferthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun,” Framework 15–17 (1981): 12–15; Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Teory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 24–25. For a discussion o these debates, see Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 116–17. 8. For a more adjudicating discussion o the �gure o the queer in eminist �lm theory, see Patricia White, “Madame X o the China Seas,” in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar (New York: Routledge, 1993), 288–90. 9. Maria San Filippo, “Unthinking Heterocentrism: Bisexual Representability in Art Cinema,” in Global Art Cinema: New Teories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (New York: Oxord University Press, 2010), 76. 10. Joseph Massad, “Art and Politics in the Cinema o Yousse Chahine,” Journal o Palestinian Studies 28, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 88. 11. Benigno Sánchez-Eppeler and Cindy Patton, eds., Queer Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 2. 12. Chris Perriam, Spanish Queer Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 1, 4, chap. 1. 13. Madhava Prasad, Ideology o the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxord University Press, 1998), 5n14, cited in Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 97. 14. Benedict Anderson, “Te Strange Story o a Strange Beast: Receptions in Tailand o Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Sat Pralaat ,” in Apichatpong Weerasethakul , ed. James Quandt (Vienna: Synema and Austrian Film Museum Books, 2009), 158–60, 170. 15. Daw-Ming Lee, Historical Dictionary o aiwan Cinema (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2013), 374. 16. Fran Martin, “Introduction: sai Ming-liang’s Intimate Public Worlds,” Journal o Chinese Cinemas 1–2 (2007): 84. 17. Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, ed., Queer Cinema: Te Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).
306
|
Notes to Introduction
18. Rajinder Dudrah, “Queer as Desis: Secret Politics o Gender and Sexuality in Bollywood Films in Diasporic Urban Ethnoscapes,” in Global Bollywood: ravels o Hindi Song and Dance, ed. Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 2008); Gayatri Gopinath and Javid Syed, “Desi Dykes and Divas: Hindi Film Clips,” presentation at the San Francisco South Asian ���� Festival ����������, 2001. 19. Juan A. Suárez, “Hélio Oiticica, ropicalism,” Criticism 56, no. 2 (2014): 295–328. 20. Song Hwee Lim, sai Ming-liang and a Cinema o Slowness (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014). 21. Rey Chow, “A Phantom Discipline,” ���� 116, no. 5 (2001): 1392–93. 22. eresa de Lauretis, “Queer exts, Bad Habits, and the Issue o a Future,” ��� 17, no. 203 (2011): 244. 23. Deborah Shaw, conversation at Global Queer Cinema workshop, Brighton, April 2013. 24. Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 100; Maria San Filippo, Te B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and elevision (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 125; Ellis Hanson, “Lesbians Who Bite,” in Out akes: Essays on Queer Teory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 190–91. 25. Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Catherine Grant, “Planes o Focus: Te Films o Lucrecia Martel,” video essay presented at the Queer Cinema and the Politics o the Global workshop, Brighton, May 2012, http:// vimeo .com/channels/222321. 26. Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” in Afer Sex? On Writing since Queer Teory , ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 173. 27. Eve Kososky Sedgwick, Epistemology o the Closet (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 1990), esp. 1, 40–44, 82–86. 28. Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories o Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 71. 29. Seminar on Distriy and queer �lm distribution at Flare: London ���� Film Festival, May 2013. 30. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New echnologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 2006); Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies o Cinema: Mapping Inormal Film Distribution (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave, 2012), 1. 31. Lobato, Shadow Economies o Cinema, 1. 32. Lobato, Shadow Economies o Cinema, 4. 33. It should be noted that much o the research or this project has depended on these inormal economies. Furthermore, the personal exchanges and collaborations that led to the completion o this book could be seen as an extension o these queer networks.
Notes to Introduction
|
307
34. Lobato, Shadow Economies o Cinema, 116. 35. Daniel Herbert, “From Art House to Your House: Te Distribution o Quality Cinema on Home Video,” Canadian Journal o Film Studies 20, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 2. 36. Barbara Mennel, Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires and Gay Cowboys (London: Wall�ower, 2012), 111. 37. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Tought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 38. Romit Dasgupta, “Queer Imaginings and raveling o ‘Family’ across Asia,” in Queering Migrations towards, rom, and beyond Asia, ed. Hugo Córdova Quero, Joseph N. Goh, and Michael Sepidoza Campos (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 99–122. 39. OutRight Action International, “Indonesia: ���� Network Celebrates �����,” http://iglhrc.org/content/indonesia-lgbt-network-celebrates-idaho. 40. Robert Kulpa, Joanna Mizielińska, and Agata Stasińska, “(Un)translatable Queer? Or, What Is Lost and Can Be Found in ranslation,” in Import— Export—ransport: Queer Teory, Queer Critique, and Queer Activism in Motion, ed. Sushila Mesquita, Maria Katharina Wiedlack, and Katrin Lasthoer
(Vienna: Zaglossus, 2012), 115–45. See also Joanna Mizielińska and Robert Kulpa, ed., Decentering Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern Euro pean Perspectives (London: Ashgate, 2011). 41. We are grateul to Victor Fan or pointing out this distinction. 42. Zvonimir Dobrovic, in Masa Zia Lenárdic and Anja Wutej, dirs., Queer Artivism, documentary �lm (White Balance, Kosovo, Slovenia, 2013). 43. “Maniesto or the Tird Queer Beograd Festival—Kvar, the Malunction,” Queer Beograd Collective, Belgrade, 2006, quoted in Irene Dioli, “Back to a Nostalgic Future: Te Queeroslav Utopia,” Sextures 1, no. 1 (2009): 12. 44. A prominent example o this kind o debate is Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2007), which insists that Western gay identities are an imposition in the Middle East. By contrast, Samar Habib argues or both the historic and present-day existence o homosexuality among women in the Muslim world: Samar Habib, Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations (New York: Routledge, 2007). For an overview o these debates, see Chris Pullen, ed., ���� ransnational Identity and the Media (London: Palgrave Macmillan: 2012), 8–9. 45. Puar, errorist Assemblages, vii. 46. Penni Kimmel, “In Search o Sensibilities: Te International Face o Gays on Film,” Maniest (June 1983): 45–47. 47. Kimmel, “In Search o Sensibilities, 45. 48. Didier Roth-Bettoni , L’homosexualité au cinema (Paris: La Musardine, 2007), back �ap copy, 684, 690. 49. Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 22; White, Uninvited , 194–215. 50. Even or those who do not live on Earth, as Michael Warner points out in his analysis o the heterosexual couple drawn by Carl Sagan and his wie, Linda, to represent our planet when carried into outer space by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Pioneer �0 spacecraf: Michael Warner, ed., 308
|
Notes to Introduction
Fear o a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Teory (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity o Minnesota Press, 1994), xxi–xxiii. 51. Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 65. 52. Ernst Bloch, Te Princi ple o Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: ��� Press, 1986), 218–19. For more on queer theory’s relationship to Bloch, see José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: Te Ten and Tere o Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 53. Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age o Global Visibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 22. 54. Sean Cubitt, Te Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: ��� Press, 2004), 338–39. 55. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World o Strangers (London: Penguin, 2006), xiii. 56. Pheng Cheah, “World against Globe: oward a Normative Conception o World Literature,” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014): 326. 57. Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas o World Cinema,” in Remapping World Cinema: Culture, Politics and Identity in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wall�ower, 2006), 24. 58. Galt and Schoonover, “Te Impurity o Art Cinema,” in Global Art Cinema: New Teories and Histories (New York: Oxord University Press, 2010), 1–28. 59. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 104; Fatimah obing Rony, Te Tird Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Te Mass Production o the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77; White, Uninvited , 202; Dudley Andrew, “ime Zones and Jet Lag: Te Flows and Phases o World Cinema,” in World Cinemas, ransnational Perspectives, ed. Kathleen Newman and Nataša Ďurovičová (New York: American Film Institute and Routledge, 2010), 59–89. 60. Andrei arkovsky, Sculpting in ime, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University o exas Press, 1986), 62. 61. Mary Ann Doane, “Te Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” Differences 14, no. 3 (2003): 89–111. 62. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Teory , ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego: Harcourt, 1949), 34–35, quoted in Doane, “Te Close-Up,” 107. 63. Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (Vancouver: University o British Columbia Press, 2008), 14. 64. Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “New Queer Cinema and Tird Cinema,” in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader , ed. Michele Aaron (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 166. 65. Leung, “New Queer Cinema and Tird Cinema,” 158. 66. Gayatri Gopinath, “Queer Regions: Locating Lesbians in Sancharram,” in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, ransgender, and Queer Studies ,” ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Oxord: Blackwell, 2007), 346. Notes to Introduction
|
309
