ABSTRACT
Until the 1990s, only a few road films had overtly destabilized the norms which install the male, white, heterosexual, middle class as the genre’s central protagonist. This did not, however, prevent people of different subculture communities from using the outlaw genre to navigate the fantasy coordinates of their desires. We can enjoy road films in complex ways even when our identity group is not explicitly represented in its master-narrative. But filmmaking in the 1990s, especially genre revisionism, shows the return of what was repressed in dominant cinema: collective pride in “deviant” gender, sexuality, and ethnicity has surfaced to haunt, taunt, infect, and transform the narrative structures that once denied it representation. This genre of rebellion is increasingly used and altered by such groups to insert their “own kind” as the leading protagonist – not just antagonists – thereby feeding a group fantasy which celebrates its difference from the norm. The once-masculinist road story of the lone anarchist on the run is reborn when genre becomes a vehicle for the representation of “otherness” along the lines of marginalized class, race, sexuality, or gender. Alastair Fowler states that genre’s function is to “mediate between the flux of history and the canons of art” (24). It is exactly that line between history and art which rebel subcultures work to change right now via genre re-vision. When part of a community cannot see itself in the historical record (because of failing to be represented by official power) or in mainstream culture, then genre is one highly normative place to begin to modify society’s prescriptions of identity. Rather than see in genre an archive of hegemony, today’s alternative film-makers envision the opportunity to revitalize, instead of reject, the canons. Meaning and transformation come from changing our structures of being and knowing, including genre. In this way, marginal communities create a radically different meaning out of a once recognizably hegemonic form – and, in this very specific but oblique way, artfully transform society and its standards.
