What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Queer Theory

Lecture structure 1. Queer Film, Theory and Activism 2. Gender as Performance 3. New Queer Cinema and Queer Film Theory

1. Queer Film, Theory and Activism Heteronormative: privileging of heterosexuality as the normal or preferred orientation Sex: biological differences as determined by medicine Gender: how manifestations of sex are organised in society; to do with culture, rather than biology

Queer film theory provides tools for identifying and criticising heteronormative codes in mainstream films highlighting queer resonances of stories and performances in classical films

Queer theory also helps us analyse films about LGBTQA experiences.

1969 – Stonewall Rebellion – Gay Liberation Front

1987 – ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)

1990 – Queer Nation – Gender Trouble (Judith Butler) – Paris is Burning

finally destroy us (Tom Kalin, 1991, video) Swoon (Tom Kalin, 1992, film)

2. Gender as Performance Structuralism emphasised the underlying structures and binary oppositions through which meaning is produced presumed that we can look behind a given text to find its truth Poststructuralism argues that binary oppositions such as male/female, white/black, straight/gay are inherently unstable argues that there is no single fixed truth behind a text; instead they emphasise the activity of the reader/viewer as a producer of meaning, which is therefore inevitability plural and fluid. 

Michel Foucault Judith Butler Butler: ‘identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes’ (‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, p. 308)

the gendered body is performative gender is the ‘effect’ of acts that we learn and repeat

Compare with Mulvey: female viewer can ‘borrow’ the ‘male gaze’ to gain pleasure

‘Drag enacts the very structure of impersonation by why any gender is assumed. […] Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalised, worn, and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation’ (Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, pp. 312–13) So, drag can be subversive, challenging structures of domination.

3. New Queer Cinema and Queer Film Theory

positive imagery rejected; political incorrectness appropriation and pastiche Michele Aaron: stance of ‘defiance’ diversity and fluidity of sexual identities

Some aspects of Paris is Burning seem to reinforce the subversive function of drag.

Postcolonial / intersectional critique of queer theory ‘In many ways the film was a graphic documentary of the way in which colonized black people […] worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit’ (hooks, ‘Is Paris Burning?’, p. 149)

‘Paris is Burning documents neither an efficacious insurrection nor a painful resubordination, but an unstable coexistence of both’ (Butler, ‘Gender is Burning’, p. 95) Drag is ‘ambivalent’