Introduction

The Introduction chapter lays out the book’s key arguments, historical and theoretical background, and methodology. By arguing that queer biographical films are biopics, this book asserts that media studies scholars and film critics have failed to appreciate the biopic’s rich queer legacy. The chapter includes discussions of the biopic’s biomedical history and use as a teaching tool in public school classrooms before demonstrating why the biopic might be attractive to queer filmmakers and audiences during the AIDS era and emergence of New Queer Cinema. Through understanding the queer biopic as a biopic, this book reorients the way we understand the biopic genre itself.

The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era

The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era returns to the historical moment of the AIDS crisis and the emergence of New Queer Cinema to investigate the phenomena of queer biopic films produced during the late 1980s–early 1990s. More specifically, the book asks why queer filmmakers repeatedly produced biographical films of queer individuals living and dead throughout the years surrounding the AIDS crisis. While film critics and historian typically treat the biopic as a conservative, if not cliché, genre, queer filmmakers have frequently used the biopic to tell stories of queer lives. This project pays particular attention to the genre’s queer resonances, opening up the biopic’s historical connections to projects of education, public health, and social hygiene, along with the production of a shared history and national identity. Queer filmmakers’ engagement with the biopic evokes the genre’s history of building life through the portrayal of lives worthy of admiration and emulation, but it also points to another biopic history, that of representing lives damaged. By portraying lives damaged by inconceivable loss, queer filmmakers challenge the illusion of a coherent self presumably reinforced by the biopic genre and in doing so, their films open up the potential for new means of connection and relationality. The book features fresh readings of the cinema of Derek Jarman, John Greyson, Todd Haynes, Barbara Hammer, and Tom Kalin. By calling for a reappraisal of the queer biopic, the book also calls for a reappraisal of New Queer Cinema’s legacy and its influence of contemporary queer film.

Las identidades trans representadas: Patrones narrativos en el cine español

Los estudios de género en relación a la cinematografía han ido en aumento en los últimos años. Existe, cada vez con mayor frecuencia, un gran interés por conocer cómo son representados diversos colectivos en los filmes, ya que este medio tiene un impacto considerable en la sociedad. De esta inquietud, surge el interrogante acerca de cómo son representadas las identidades trans en el cien español. Partiendo de la teoría propuesta por Rich (2013) en relación al New Queer Cinema, así como de la idea de la teóricas fundadoras de la Teoría Fílmica Feminista sobre la importancia de las representaciones en relación con la sociedad, se ha tratado de contextualizar y enfatizar los aspectos más relevantes concernientes a las representaciones de la otredad, concretamente las representaciones LGTBIQ+, poniendo especial atención en las teorías mencionadas. Para abordar esta cuestión se han analizado ocho personajes trans –principales o secundarios con desarrollo– de seis películas españolas enmarcadas en el siglo XXI mediante la propuesta de análisis del personaje de Casetti y Di Chio (2003) y la posterior aportación de Guarinos (2013) al respecto de dicho modelo de análisis de las esferas de acción. Se han hallado en estos personajes ciertos patrones de representación relacionados, principalmente, con el perfil iconográfico de los mismos.

Making a Scene: Queercore Cinema

This chapter recuperates the oft-overlooked queer punk cinematic corpus of queercore, and delineates its constituting elements: deviant content and do-it-yourself (DIY) practice, coalescing in an insistence on queercore’s capital D subcultural Difference. In doing so, this chapter engages three films by queercore instigator G. B. Jones as centerpieces around which a constellation of other instructive instances appear: The Troublemakers (1990), The Lollipop Generation (2008), and The Yo-Yo Gang (1992). Irreverent, experimental, and unapologetic, queercore cinema first emerged in the 1980s, as academics and activists were beginning to articulate notions of the “radical queer,” and it forges a neglected link between the mischievous films of the 1960s and 1970s gay underground and the provocative, arty experimentations of 1990s New Queer Cinema.

The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema

Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. Although many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement in the United States (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich the “new queer cinema”), films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms: cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance; at some points, for example, in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing “history” not as dots on a progressive spectrum but as an uneven story of struggle, the writers in this volume stress that queer cinema did not appear miraculously at one moment but arrived on currents throughout the century-long history of the medium. Likewise, while queer is an Anglophone term that has been widely circulated, it by no means names a unified or complete spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, just as the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup struggles to contain the distinctive histories, politics, and cultural productions of trans artists and genderqueer practices. Across the globe, media-makers have interrogated identity and desire through the medium of cinema through rubrics that sometimes vigorously oppose the Western embrace of the pejorative term queer, foregrounding instead indigenous genders and sexualities or those forged in the Global South or those seeking alternative epistemologies. Finally, though “cinema” is in our title, many scholars in this collection see this term as an encompassing one, referencing cinema and media in a convergent digital environment. The lively and dynamic conversations introduced here aspire to sustain further reflection as “queer cinema” shifts into new configurations.

Invasion of the Child Snatchers: Pedophilic Seduction in New Queer Cinema

Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the first decade of the twenty-first century, American independent cinema began to engage the taboo of intergenerational intimacy as its animating provocation and ready-made narrative solution. This chapter analyzes two films associated with the New Queer Cinema that appear to challenge the conservative paradigms of erotic endangerment embodied by these films. By offering portraits of precocious adolescents whose shattering encounters with sexuality defy the norms of pedophilic representation, both L.I.E. (Michael Cuesta, 2001), and Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004) mine the potential of queer sexuality to transform dominant narratives of violation into ambiguous dramas of sexual awakening and kinship. Yet, in spite of New Queer Cinema’s promise to offer an alternative to the standard depiction of the monstrous pedophile, these texts fail to embody a genuinely counter-cinema practice, relying instead on a paradigm of “pedo-normativity” developed in the midst of the AIDS crisis and the War on Terror.

After the New Queer Cinema

This chapter historicizes the work of the New Queer Cinema (NQC), a term coined by the author to describe a group of groundbreaking films that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It argues that the NQC sensibility fueled subsequent imaginative film and television, from makers as diverse as Ang Lee, Todd Haynes, Silas Howard, and Celine Sciamma. At the heart of the chapter is the conviction that contemporary politics demand a new framework for queer and trans media, namely the idea of intersectionality, demonstrated by makers and artists such as Janelle Monae, Allie Logout, Wu Tsang, The Nest Collective, and the trio of Mika Gustafson, Olivia Kastebring, and Christina Tsiobanelis. Intersectionality enables mutuality, recognition, and alliance in a time of deep division and terror; it asks queer media makers to take transgression beyond personal expressions and identity into collective acts of world making.

Lavender Images and Poetic Landscapes: My Thirty Years in the Queer Film Ecosystem

This chapter by LGBT filmmaker and film historian Jenni Olson is a firsthand account of her thirty-plus years of work across the ecosystem of queer cinema. It covers her curatorial work in the late 1980s and early 1990s (she was codirector of the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival); her extraordinary efforts as an LGBT film collector and archivist over the decades (her collection was acquired by the Harvard Film Archive in 2020); her pioneering work in online queer-film exhibition, as cofounder of PlanetOut.com; her decade as director of marketing for the LGBT film distributor, Wolfe Video; and her work as a maker of digressive and contemplative 16mm essay films, such as The Royal Road (2015) and The Joy of Life (2005), which speak from a butch lesbian perspective and reflect on a wide array of preoccupations.