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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822373674 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/17/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King's College London and the author of Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image.
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Queer Cinema in the World
By Karl Schoonover, Rosalind Galt
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7367-4
CHAPTER 1
FIGURES IN THE WORLD
The Geopolitics of the Transcultural Queer
Queer figures populate world cinema. In films that narrate the global, clichéd characters such as the sexually vulnerable Other, the bisexual migrant, the outsider closet case, the unveiled woman, the transgender exile, the un-dutiful daughter, the immigrant son, and the lesbian backpacker abound. This chapter is about how films stage the question of the world through such queer figures, and how these figures allow films to recast the relationships of identities to intercultural difference and international space. Our analysis opens out the geopolitics of sexuality as it has been interrogated by contemporary queer theory and challenges how that theory engages with visual culture. Confronted by efforts in the late 1980s to define queer, Teresa de Lauretis asserted the mission for queer scholarly work as "to rethink the sexual in new ways, elsewhere and other-wise." De Lauretis was here engaging the implication of sexualities in issues of gender, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, generation, and class in the United States, as well as the ways that sexuality might speak about sexual acts, perversions, and cathexes, as well as orientation. She insisted that "otherwise desiring subjects" could shift the "semantic horizons" and "forms of community." Thus, the queer not only raises the problem of otherness but also directs our thinking toward the "other-wise" and the "elsewhere." The process of figuring queerness, we propose, is therefore also a mode of thinking spatiality and the geopolitical landscape of the subject.
Queer scholars have used de Lauretis's argument to shake up the conventional parameters of existing academic disciplines. In the process, the figurability of the queer has been contested. Here we argue that the space of otherness is not merely a new frontier of identity politics. It is also a zone for renegotiating modern subjectivity. In other words, we adapt de Lauretis's elsewhere and otherwise to rethink the relationship between the alterity of queerness and the spaces of the world. In a study of queer geographies, Kath Browne, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown write that "sexuality — its regulation, norms, institutions, pleasures and desires — cannot be understood without understanding the spaces through which it is constituted, practiced and lived." For these authors, what is at stake here is an "institutionalisation of sexualised imagined geographies ... [which holds] the power to define who belongs and to define what bodies are allowed to do, when and where." From a film studies perspective, this analysis prompts the question of whether cinema as an institution produces geographies that center heteronormativity or whether its figures might unsettle such dominant regimes of space.
Jordana Rosenberg and Amy Villarejo advocate for the geopolitical potential of queer theory much along these lines, asking, "How might a methodology attuned to both sexuality and the specificities of capitalist crisis orient us toward a world other than the one in which we find ourselves currently mired?" For Rosenberg and Villarejo, queer theory must be articulated to materialist critiques of contemporary world systems. Queer subjectivity has the potential, for them, to figure the other-wise and elsewheres of late capitalism. Or, as Roderick Ferguson puts it, "Contemporary globalization is constituted though regimes of gender and sexual normativity and the disruptions to those regimes." Ferguson does not celebrate global sexual identities but argues that queer critical practices have the potential to disarm modes of being that currently dominate world systems. This means that figures of queers (and representational practices that foreground such figures) may hold the potential to expose the mechanisms of liberal capitalism's regulatory structures.
More important, however, Ferguson's work insists on the processes of racialization that form and are formed by sexual and gender normativities. Expanding on Chandan Reddy's work, he argues "that racist practice articulates itself generally as gender and sexual regulation, and that gender and sexual differences variegate racial formations. This articulation, moreover, accounts for the social formations that compose liberal capitalism." Many of the films we analyze in this chapter can be seen as either participating in or problematizing this process of racialization. They stage the question of global politics explicitly through their othering of the queer figure, whether it be along the lines of race or ethnicity. The troublesome discourses of multiculturalism are a constitutive part of the liberal identities offered to the gay subject of late capitalism, and these identities take part in queer cinema's global circulation. The queer of color analysis that Ferguson and others propose demands that global studies of cinema recognize race and ethnicity as constitutive of queer subjectivities. In other words, the queer characters in these films are not merely representatives of a newly globalized field of vision. Their figuration as "others" also incites a critique that renders the segregation of white Westernized queer theory and global studies obsolete.
Neville Hoad asserts that queer theory is foundationally invested in geopolitical difference, whether it admits it or not: "In terms of colonial attempts to impose the gendered division of productive, reproductive and affective labor of a state-sanctioned monogamous heterosexuality on the world, connections between the alterity of elsewhere and the alterity of queerness become obvious." These historically intermeshed alterities do not, in and of themselves, make queer figures geopolitically resistant: the settler-colonial logic of Israeli films such as Ha-Buah/The Bubble (Eytan Fox, dir., 2006) and Ha-Sippur shel Yossi/Yossi (Fox, dir., 2012) demonstrate the urgent need to theorize the geopolitical complicity of some queer figurations. But the connection Hoad asserts does ask us to think resistance to coloniality and heteronormativity in relation to each other. This chapter traces a series of queer figures across world cinema, discovering them to be disruptions and provocations to — as much as confirmations of — the stable accounts of sexual and cultural identities promoted by globalization. Here we will be looking at depictions, representations, and categories of identity and being as they appear on-screen. But figuration is not only a question of character and narrative: cinema is more than a screen reflecting back existing social formations, and the figure of the queer poses a formal problem for these films as much as it provides a vehicle for representing known identities. Hence, we do not read the figure of the queer characterologically. What cinema does in its structures of point of view, identification, and narration is not inconsequential to the geopolitics of sex and gender in a globalized world.
In the 1970s, feminist film theory took a decisive step away from reflectionist models of representation to insist that the figure of woman was significantly constituted through cinematic structures of identification and desire. This intervention remains critically productive, and in a similar move this book claims that queerness today is vividly constituted through representational forms and the cinematic apparatus that produces and circulates those forms globally. Cinematic experiences of gender dissidence and non-hetero sexualities, we suggest, are brought about not only via sociologically reflective representations (e.g., LGBT characters) but also, and more significantly, through cinematic forms, narrational structures, audience address, and modes of exhibition. The entire apparatus of cinema takes part in the reproduction of sexual and gendered subjectivities. Thus, in this chapter we turn to the cinematic figuration of queerness as a locus of unique political force and historical urgency for the articulation and contestation of queerness in the world.
To understand the stakes of this claim for our contemporary moment, we must first turn back to an earlier moment of film studies to see how entangled questions of sexuality and worldliness are in the histories of thinking on cinema. In 1990, Richard Dyer published Now You See It, the first major survey of gay and lesbian films after Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet. Dyer writes that he chose to end his survey in 1980 because lesbian/gay films proliferate enormously after that date, and if the book took into consideration the 1980s, he worried, it would become simply "a book of lists." Dyer admits that using this cutoff results in a book that discusses more films "by and about men than women, and next to no representation of non-white, non-Northern/Western people." Unlike Russo, who seems fairly indiscriminate about genre and mode of production while unconsciously Western in scope, Dyer is keen to acknowledge the relatively Euro-American–centric nature of his survey. Now You See It does reference some non-Western films, such as the Japanese film Funeral Parade of Roses, the Filipino director Lino Brocka and the Mexican film El lugar sin limites/Place without Limits (Arturo Ripstein, dir., 1978), and the later edition of the book expands to include international directors such as Youssef Chahine. However, Dyer writes, "The specificity of the idea of 'being' lesbian or gay means that the very different way same-sex relations are constructed and experienced in Japan or Third World countries does not come into my purview." Dyer's words here reflect his insistent anti-imperialist spirit; the rest of the world appears in moments throughout the book as a limit point, and one that demands the otherwise brave undertaking maintain a modest scope and scale.
While many of Dyer's analyses remain pertinent and even urgent to our contemporary moment, justifying such limited parameters would be clearly undesirable today. As elegantly as he brackets these concerns, Now You See It should be understood as speaking from a different moment in queer scholarship. There is a striking tension in Dyer's approach that remains relevant to our present work. Even as he rejects the political utility of universal sexual identity categories, Dyer retains a certain investment in a transcultural existence of non-normative sex: "Even the words homosexual, homoerotic, lesbian or gay were hard to apply outside of Western culture since the nineteenth century. Many came to argue that, while affective and/or sexual acts between persons of the same sex were indeed a universal reality, the idea that people who engaged in them belonged to a distinct group of persons (homosexuals, lesbians) was found only in modern times in the West." We confront here what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would call the incommensurability of acts and identities as a way to make a claim for the universality of sex acts that maintains a sense of cultural relativism.
Dyer anticipates the focus on the non-Western queer as a highly contested geopolitical figure in the early twenty-first century. These debates might be summarized in the following questions. Are words such as "gay" or "queer" or "lesbian" descriptions of attractions that exist in approximately analogous terms across the world's diverse cultures? Or does the project of applying these terms globally impose Western notions of identity onto sexual and gender modalities that are misunderstood or unrecognized in the West? Dyer speaks softly but firmly to those who circulate phobic notions of a world in which queer sex does not exist or has no grounding. In the book's last paragraph, there is a striking parenthetical sentence: "(Humans could live, and do and have, in worlds without gay/lesbian identities and cultures, though not without gay/lesbian acts; but we do not live in such a world and cannot magically transport ourselves to one.)" Not only are non-hetero acts universal for him, but he insists that we live in a world in which queer cultures exist everywhere in quite material ways. In a similar fashion, it would be dangerously anachronistic to think of queer cinema as unscathed by global politics or outside of debates on the geo-cultural parameters of identity categories. In writing this book, we have tried to remain sensitive to our limitations as spectators, scholars, and translators, yet at the same time we insist on the value of reading film culture transnationally and comparatively as a site where the frictions between identities and acts enter into public discourse and public experience. The Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman considers that his film Lola + Bilidikid/Lola and Billy the Kid (1999) draws strong responses because although "Turkish people had been watching foreign gay films for years ... as soon as Turks make the same, they are embarrassed." In a sense, then, the opposing impulses to universalize and relativize represent the highly pitched debates between those who assert gay rights globally and those who insist on cultural specificity. As worldviews, they appear irreconcilable. Yet the relationship between world cinema and national film traditions, like that between global and local modes of sexual expression, cannot be thought entirely independently from each other.
Gay for Pay, or Queer for the Gay International
A telling intersection of queer identity and geopolitics came in 2014 at the UK premiere of the Cuban/Spanish film La Partida/The Last Match (Antonio Hens, dir., 2013) at BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival. The Last Match describes the life of two young men in Havana who turn to sex work with older, foreign male tourists to support themselves and their families. Gradually, an attraction develops between the two friends, but it is eventually destroyed by their struggle to rise above poverty. The film enacts and depends on a privileged international gaze looking at the global South. It plays with many of the visual clichés of world cinema — its saturated colors, gritty realism, and shallow focus echo world cinema hits such as Cidade de Deus/City of God (Fernando Meireilles and Kátia Lund, dirs., 2002) — while leveraging a prostitution melodrama that uses the prohibition of same-sex desire as an exploitative narrational way into suspense. The Cuban protagonists offer a pleasurable insight into a world as ripe with energy and desire as it is lacking in economic opportunity. They are figures of queer poverty; desirable bodies; spectacles for the Western spectator (figure 1.1). After the screening, the film's Spanish director Antonio Hens and two of its stars took questions from the festival's audience via Skype. Originally, the trio was meant to be at the premiere, but both actors were Cuban and were denied visas to enter the United Kingdom under an intensified immigration regime. During the Q&A, Hens initially argued that he did not want the film to have a political message but went on to claim that because Cuba does not officially celebrate homosexuality, he was obliged to end the story tragically. Regardless, the film's real question, he said, was whether real love can be found in economic difficulty. These comments about the unsustainability of love without money, alongside the voyeuristic narrative, feed directly into a logic that insists capitalism is the solution to Cuba's problems.
A puzzling series of unchecked contradictions plagued this premiere. The program notes contain a director's statement in which Hens marks his status as an outsider to Cuban culture: "I felt very much puzzled when I first learnt that it was not a shame for a teen Cuba macho to be seen in the street walking hand in hand with a tourist some decades older than him. Money was the element that subverted the logical order." Yet during the Q&A, Reinier Díaz, one of the actors, admitted to his fear about Cubans' reaction to the film, given that he was shown having sex with a man. No one — least of all Hens — appeared aware of the parallels between on- and off-screen economies around "gay for pay." Moreover, the London premiere was sponsored by the multinational consulting firm Accenture. The audience was whiter and skewed more male than at any of the Flare festival's other screenings, and perhaps included many of Accenture's clientele, employees, and their friends. The audience giggled knowingly and seemed enthusiastic about the film's mixture of half-naked boys playing soccer, artfully lit scenes of sex for hire, and liberal concern for oppressed people from far-off lands. The director's unquestioned assumptions about the parameters of the political seemed largely validated both by the erotics of pathos and pity deployed by the film and the titillating questions that the festival audience asked the actors. The Last Match folds presumptions of Western economic prosperity as the means to personal freedom into its apparently apolitical imagery of gay affection. The global North audience had little resistance to deeming queer intimacies in the global South unsustainable, and a Western definition of sexual identity is the only one granted to both fictional protagonists and the actors who portray them. Thus, they appear to us as queer only in conditional terms, as long as they reconcile themselves to an extra-national life or to being the object of a transnational and voyeuristic desiring gaze.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Queer Cinema in the World by Karl Schoonover, Rosalind Galt. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. 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
"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."
"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."