ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provincialise heterosexuality. Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential work of postcolonial theory Provincializing Europe demonstrated the need to understand modernity without reference to Europe as a centre. The chapter reframes World Cinema both without installing Europe and America as the source of film style upon which all other iterations of film style are based and without assuming heterosexuality as the necessary precondition and determinant of the cinematic experience. Queer film aesthetics create contiguities and affinities across geographic and historical distances, and these aesthetics demand different modes of viewing, attention and critique. In one of queer theory's famous early revisionist gestures, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brilliantly exposes the heterosexist and ethnocentric unconscious of canon formation. Through cinematic means, the shapes of a world remade in queer terms can become known and felt. At a 2013 roundtable discussion at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, none of the participants thought that a global queer style was desirable.
