ABSTRACT
Writing about queer cinema in 2010, film scholar Bob Nowlan asked if it was retrograde to consider queer cinema as a radical, politically inflected cinematic mode in light of what he saw as film studies’ conflation of queer and LGBT identities. Had queer become, he asked, less about disrupting and more about creating a blanket of inclusivity under which nonheteronormative practices found safety (2010: 10)? Five years later, queer cinema scholarship continues to practice an inclusivity that can make it productively maddening to characterize even when viewed as a unique subdiscipline that draws from, but does not mirror, queer studies or film studies. Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street locate queer cinema’s ability to avoid the compartmentalization and “drive towards quotable synthesis” found in academia to the fact that it has always “belonged as much to film and video makers, festival programmers and political activists as to academics” (2007: 1). If it has coalesced around anything fundamental, queer cinema scholarship values Alexander Doty’s invocation of a “definitional elusiveness” (2000: 6) found in queer theory’s fundamental “indeterminacy” (Jagose 1997:1). One of the issues at play in valuing indeterminacy and the inclusivity that it may foster, as
Nowlan points out, is the potential to erode the radical politics that drove queer cinematic articulations of the recent past. As more collections about LGBTQ+ cinemas are published, Nowlan’s question about the radical inflections of queerness helps frame how we might pull apart film studies’ conflation of queer and LGBT identities by focusing on queer studies and queer cinema studies’ intersection at a point of radical subjectivity that builds on women’s and lesbian/gay studies’ “refusal of any identity-based foundational category” (Hall and Jagose 2013: xv). Distinguishing what is queer in film studies focuses attention on the fissures and joints in how queerness is conceived in international and multiregional queer cinema. The plurality of experiences articulated in international LGBTQ+ cinemas coupled with the, at times, self-consciously political aim of queer studies marks queer cinema studies as a particular site in which destabilized identities and modes of filmmaking find a common cause. Defining queer is something I consciously avoid doing throughout this essay because I am focused on its indeterminacy and non-foundational status. I use the terms LGBT and LGBTQ+ to signify identity-based analysis and filmmaking, adopting the latter as a current, more inclusive description. When I refer to LGBT identities or studies I am drawing attention to moments in film studies or film history when LGBT
studies dominated discourse about identity or when the authors I write about have used the LGBT description in their own work. This essay, then, locates the shared appreciation of the “radical” in queer and queer
cinema studies to prompt its review of contemporary, international invocations of queerness as a film practice rather than a genre. The practice of queer filmmaking and the cinematic modes by which it is expressed value deviance and an activist aesthetic as a counterpoint to an increasing proliferation of positive Western cinematic and televisual LGBTQ+ representations. What I hope to do by surveying the field of queer cinema studies is to argue that this form of queerness is a resurgent mode of analysis in LGBTQ+ cinema studies that both stages a version of the perceived historical differences between LGBT and queer studies and that demonstrates how valuing radical process and aesthetic forms, as queer studies does, contributes to the difficulty in characterizing queer cinema as a genre. In doing so, contemporary, international queer cinema studies uses queerness to signal how process takes precedence over identity by valuing hybridity and indeterminacy and reasserts a celebration of the radical as a fundamental aspect of LGBTQ+ politics. This turn evokes the ethos of British filmmaker Derek Jarman’s “difficult” self-identity:
I didn’t discover my sexuality to sell in – I want change. … To call Pasolini, or myself for that matter, “gay artists” is foolish and limiting, one day maybe we will dispense with boundaries and categories. I was never gay, queer maybe, difficult certainly, with good reason.
