ABSTRACT
The idea of queer authorship focuses attention not on the queerness that might inhere in the text but in the author's own intent and/or identity. Gender is not a fixed, unchangeable 'reality'. To consider adaptation as queer performance, this chapter examines how queer actors or performers affect meaning in a given adaptation. It suggests the queerness of adaptation itself; to queer and to adapt are processes of reading, of resisting, of destabilising notions of authorship, authority, ideology. Adaptations that feature anti-linear narrative, that resist conventional narrative structures, might be queer; certain genres — horror films, musicals, film noir, and animation — have also been theorised as queer. Benshoff and Griffin point out that "some cinematic forms invite audiences to glory in the chaotic extravagance that occurs when the rigid social conventions of normality are overturned". Queer form might also refer to adaptations in non-traditional media, including any of the digital forms described under the umbrella 'new media.'.
