Queer Cinema in the World

by Karl Schoonover

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900822362615
Publisher:	Duke University Press Books
Publication date:	12/09/2016
Pages:	406
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Karl Schoonover is Associate Professor and Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick and the author of Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema.

Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King's College London and the author of Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction. Queer, World, Cinema  1

1. Figures in the World: The Geopolitics of theTranscutlural Queer  35

2. A Worldly Affair: Queer Film Festivals and Global Space  79

3. Speaking Otherwise: Allegory, Narrative, and Queer Public Space  119

4. The Queer Popular: Genre and Perverse Economies of Scale  167

5. Registers of Belonging: Queer Worldly Affects  211

6. The Emergence of Queer Cinematic Time  259

Notes  305

Bibliography  339

Index  357

What People are Saying About This

Shohini Ghosh

"In a self-admittedly 'risky venture' Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt bring together three deeply contested terms—'queer,' 'cinema,' and 'world' to reconfigure—successfully and elegantly—our imagination of queer cinema’s ongoing project of conjuring different worlds. The book opens the door to a diversity of queer cinematic projects that while moving through the circuits of the global, carry with them their particular histories, cartographies, poetics, politics, aesthetics, spatio-temporalities, and erotics. A most intellectually audacious work."

Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms - Patricia White

"As the first substantive text on contemporary global queer cinema, Queer Cinema in the World transforms current debates in world cinema while bringing a welcome disciplinary specificity to queer theory's musings on cinema and transnational queer representability. Provocative, generative, and teachable, Queer Cinema in the World excites the reader with its scope and smartness."

Editorial Reviews

"By providing such an array of critical analysis and scholarly resources and by showcasing diverse filmic expressions of queer identity, the authors successfully open countless channels for future research, crucial to creating a larger space for and attention to queer representations in cinema and society at large."

Journal of Film and Video - Joanna Randall

"Queer Cinema in the World is a work of remarkable capaciousness and intellectual adventure, written in welcome defiance of the scholarly demand for tight focus and narrow specialization. Maximalist rather than minimalist, it offers a wide view that, among its other pleasures, will provide many readers with introductions to neglected films and filmmakers as well as with compelling treatments of works that are now part of the canon of queer cinema."

Cineaste - Corey K. Creekmur

"Queer Cinema in the World is both brilliant and maddening. It is a daring attempt by Schoonover and Galt to explode the relationship between queer theory and film studies that is bound by Western intellectual conventions. Highly recommended."

Choice - G. R. Butters Jr.

"Theoretically daring. . . . it is not difficult to see [Queer Cinema in the World] serving as a cornerstone of future scholarship on queer cinema, and the authors should be commended."

Screen - James Hodgson

"A wildly ambitious configuring of contemporary queer cinema that has no less than a holistic revision of cinematic representation on its mind. . . . Queer Cinema in the World belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who consistently grapples with understanding human difference as a positive quality of social and political life."

Slant Magazine - Clayton Dillard

"Wonderfully ambitious and carefully argued."

College Literature - Lindsey Green-Simms

"Absolutely productive and provocative. . . . An important intervention that has stakes for the field of media studies [and] for social justice."

Film Quarterly - Regina Longo

"[A] willingness to attend to the surprising ways and spaces where queer cinema can appear is part of what makes the book so dizzyingly comprehensive and enjoyable. . . . This commitment to searching out queer world cinema’s as yet unthought possibilities of pleasure and intimacy shines through."

Hong Kong Review of Books - Brandon Kemp

"In a self-admittedly 'risky venture' Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt bring together three deeply contested terms—'queer,' 'cinema,' and 'world' to reconfigure—successfully and elegantly—our imagination of queer cinema’s ongoing project of conjuring different worlds. The book opens the door to a diversity of queer cinematic projects that while moving through the circuits of the global, carry with them their particular histories, cartographies, poetics, politics, aesthetics, spatio-temporalities, and erotics. A most intellectually audacious work."

Shohini Ghosh

"As the first substantive text on contemporary global queer cinema, Queer Cinema in the World transforms current debates in world cinema while bringing a welcome disciplinary specificity to queer theory's musings on cinema and transnational queer representability. Provocative, generative, and teachable, Queer Cinema in the World excites the reader with its scope and smartness."

Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms - Patricia White