ABSTRACT
World middlebrow films are not formally experimental or subversive in the ways usually attributed to art genres or even to the kind of prize-winners heralded at Venice, Toronto, Berlin or Cannes. In locating a world cinematic middlebrow, queer cinema provides not only an interesting subset but, in fact, a necessary case study. Middlebrow overtly proclaims itself as a category of taste, as a means of distinction or group definition, but these labels are inherently unstable. As labels go, middlebrow depends more on the exhibition-specific mode of address than on textual features or formal signatures. Films can pass in and out of the category of middlebrow depending on how a given exhibition context interpellates audiences. Queer cinema is categorically linked to sex, or at least to dissident sexuality, which already promises tension with one quality of the middlebrow as it has been understood in a European context, which is the reaffirmation of dominant bourgeois social values.
