1. What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Queer Theory

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

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

4. Queer film theory provides tools for
identifying and criticising mainstream cinema’s heteronormativity
highlighting the queer resonances of stories and performances in classical films

5. Queer theory also helps us analyse films about LGBTQA experiences.

6. 1969 – Stonewall Rebellion
– Gay Liberation Front

7. 1987 – ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)

8. 1990 – Queer Nation – Gender Trouble (Judith Butler) – Paris is Burning

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

11. 2. Gender as Performance
Butler, Gender Trouble (1990): argues that identity categories such as ‘woman’ reinforce gender hierarchy and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’.

12. Butler: gender is a social construction or performance, rather than expressing an essence.

13. Compare with Mulvey (1981) on the female viewer’s oscillating masculine and feminine identifications.

14. ‘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.

15. 3. New Queer Cinema and Queer Film Theory

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

18. In miming gender norms or ideals, to what extent do the ball competitors critically rework them?

19. hooks: postcolonial / intersectional critique of queer theory
drag and misogyny
‘In many ways the film was a graphic documentary of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness’ (hooks, ‘Is Paris Burning?’, p. 149)

20. hooks argues that Livingston adopts an invisible ‘imperial overseeing position’

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