ABSTRACT
In terms of generic film types, the epic more often says less about the history it purports to portray than something about the precise social moment it emanates from. History as heterotopia! The epic functions, whether consciously or not, through displacements of time and culture, allowing the present to masquerade as some queered representation of the past. I take queer in its established theoretical sense to refer to the desire in any art form to challenge and push debates on gender and sexuality. Further, I take queer as a concept that embraces all “non-straight” approaches to living practice-including, within our context, film and popular culture. As a politics, or a practice, queering seeks to confuse binary essentialisms around issues of identity, expose their limitations and to suggest that things are more “blurred” than one might initially suspect. With this in mind, let us begin from the beginning, that is to say, where the Joan of Arc story is located.
