Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474440929
- eISBN:
- 9781474477024
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440929.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The first transnational and transmedia companion to the post-millennial Gothic. This book explores the post-millennial Gothic. It emphasises ‘new’ themes and emergent subgenres as well as revisions ...
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The first transnational and transmedia companion to the post-millennial Gothic. This book explores the post-millennial Gothic. It emphasises ‘new’ themes and emergent subgenres as well as revisions of the traditional Gothic, thus pressing readers to interrogate the multi-layered, multi-vocal conversations that occur within the Gothic in the new century. The areas of coverage engaged in this collection are parts of emerging interdisciplinary fields, and the book will thus be at the forefront of discussions about subgenres, such as Afro-futurism, Gothic comedy and Steampunk, as well as transnational and ethnic forms of the Gothic. It provides preeminent scholarship for those interested in discovering more about the development of the Gothic in recent years and its immediate relevance to our times. The 20 chapters provide the most detailed, demonstrate analytical exploration of this young field than ever before.Less
The first transnational and transmedia companion to the post-millennial Gothic. This book explores the post-millennial Gothic. It emphasises ‘new’ themes and emergent subgenres as well as revisions of the traditional Gothic, thus pressing readers to interrogate the multi-layered, multi-vocal conversations that occur within the Gothic in the new century. The areas of coverage engaged in this collection are parts of emerging interdisciplinary fields, and the book will thus be at the forefront of discussions about subgenres, such as Afro-futurism, Gothic comedy and Steampunk, as well as transnational and ethnic forms of the Gothic. It provides preeminent scholarship for those interested in discovering more about the development of the Gothic in recent years and its immediate relevance to our times. The 20 chapters provide the most detailed, demonstrate analytical exploration of this young field than ever before.
Gigi Adair
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620375
- eISBN:
- 9781789629804
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620375.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines ...
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This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.Less
This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Jaime Harker
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469643359
- eISBN:
- 9781469643373
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643359.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the spatial reimaginations of Southern lesbian feminists, from communes to queer contact zones. This chapter uses geography to reassess the landyke movement and its role in ...
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This chapter explores the spatial reimaginations of Southern lesbian feminists, from communes to queer contact zones. This chapter uses geography to reassess the landyke movement and its role in lesbian feminism literature, which reimagines and queers space.Less
This chapter explores the spatial reimaginations of Southern lesbian feminists, from communes to queer contact zones. This chapter uses geography to reassess the landyke movement and its role in lesbian feminism literature, which reimagines and queers space.
J. Samaine Lockwood
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469625362
- eISBN:
- 9781469625386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469625362.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This chapter argues that literature thought of as regionalist—works by Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett—was self-consciously historiographical. These writers, in their ...
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This chapter argues that literature thought of as regionalist—works by Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett—was self-consciously historiographical. These writers, in their fiction, represented unmarried women's relationship to colonial history through depicting characters' re-performance of history and their sensual engagement of historical spaces and matter (colonial houses, old-fashioned gardens, and “old” women). In addition to analyzing regionalist fiction by these authors, this chapter examines photographs Emma Lewis Coleman and Sarah Orne Jewett collaborated on for a special edition of Deephaven that never reached print. Taken together, these various works demonstrate how a notion of New England exceptionalism underwrote the New England regionalists' vision of women's queer mobility on an international stage.Less
This chapter argues that literature thought of as regionalist—works by Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett—was self-consciously historiographical. These writers, in their fiction, represented unmarried women's relationship to colonial history through depicting characters' re-performance of history and their sensual engagement of historical spaces and matter (colonial houses, old-fashioned gardens, and “old” women). In addition to analyzing regionalist fiction by these authors, this chapter examines photographs Emma Lewis Coleman and Sarah Orne Jewett collaborated on for a special edition of Deephaven that never reached print. Taken together, these various works demonstrate how a notion of New England exceptionalism underwrote the New England regionalists' vision of women's queer mobility on an international stage.
Seán Kennedy (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474460460
- eISBN:
- 9781474490801
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474460460.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book examines why Beckett’s writing is so queer, so disabled and disabling. Why did Beckett write so soften about mental illness, disability, perversion? Why did he take such an interest in ...
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This book examines why Beckett’s writing is so queer, so disabled and disabling. Why did Beckett write so soften about mental illness, disability, perversion? Why did he take such an interest in ‘abnormals’ and ‘degenerates’? How did he reconceive ‘the human’ in the wake of Hitler and Stalin? Drawing on Beckett’s voluminous archive, as well as his primary texts, the authors use psychoanalysis, queer theory, disability theory and biopolitics to push Beckett studies beyond the normal.Less
This book examines why Beckett’s writing is so queer, so disabled and disabling. Why did Beckett write so soften about mental illness, disability, perversion? Why did he take such an interest in ‘abnormals’ and ‘degenerates’? How did he reconceive ‘the human’ in the wake of Hitler and Stalin? Drawing on Beckett’s voluminous archive, as well as his primary texts, the authors use psychoanalysis, queer theory, disability theory and biopolitics to push Beckett studies beyond the normal.
Kevin Ohi
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816694778
- eISBN:
- 9781452950754
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816694778.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what author Kevin Ohi terms ...
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Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what author Kevin Ohi terms “thwarted transmission.” Such scenes, however, do not so much concede the impossibility of survival as look into what constitutes literary knowledge and whether it can properly be said to be an object to be transmitted, preserved, or lost. Beginning with general questions of transmission—the conveying of knowledge in pedagogy, the transmission and material preservation of texts and forms of knowledge, and even the impalpable communication between text and reader—Dead Letters Sent examines two senses of “queer transmission.” First, it studies the transmission of a minority sexual culture, of queer ways of life and the specialized knowledges they foster. Second, it examines the queer potential of literary and cultural transmission, the queerness that is sheltered within tradition. By exploring how these two senses are intertwined, it builds a persuasive argument for the relevance of queer criticism to literary study. Its detailed attention to works by Plato, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, James, and Faulkner seeks to formulate a practice of reading adequate to the queerness Ohi’s book uncovers within the literary tradition. Ohi identifies a radical new future for both queer theory and close reading: the possibility that each might exceed itself in merging with the other, creating a queer theory of literary tradition immanent in an immersed practice of reading.Less
Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what author Kevin Ohi terms “thwarted transmission.” Such scenes, however, do not so much concede the impossibility of survival as look into what constitutes literary knowledge and whether it can properly be said to be an object to be transmitted, preserved, or lost. Beginning with general questions of transmission—the conveying of knowledge in pedagogy, the transmission and material preservation of texts and forms of knowledge, and even the impalpable communication between text and reader—Dead Letters Sent examines two senses of “queer transmission.” First, it studies the transmission of a minority sexual culture, of queer ways of life and the specialized knowledges they foster. Second, it examines the queer potential of literary and cultural transmission, the queerness that is sheltered within tradition. By exploring how these two senses are intertwined, it builds a persuasive argument for the relevance of queer criticism to literary study. Its detailed attention to works by Plato, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, James, and Faulkner seeks to formulate a practice of reading adequate to the queerness Ohi’s book uncovers within the literary tradition. Ohi identifies a radical new future for both queer theory and close reading: the possibility that each might exceed itself in merging with the other, creating a queer theory of literary tradition immanent in an immersed practice of reading.
Alpesh Kantilal Patel
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381717
- eISBN:
- 9781781382288
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381717.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
Alpesh Patel seeks to re-invoke and re-work the term ‘Black Atlantic’ by suggesting the ‘Brown Atlantic’ as an actual and imaginary space that recognizes the specific colonial and postcolonial ...
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Alpesh Patel seeks to re-invoke and re-work the term ‘Black Atlantic’ by suggesting the ‘Brown Atlantic’ as an actual and imaginary space that recognizes the specific colonial and postcolonial legacies that the United Kingdom and North America share. Interrogating the heteronormative and sexist logic of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and the intra-/inter-racial connections of the ‘Black/Brown Altantic’, Patel uses this methodological framework to look at queer South Asian diasporic subjectivities. The methodology demands that sexuality, ‘race’, notions of ‘diaspora’/home, gender, and class be considered together, which serves to denaturalize or expose power structures by making them visible, and allowing them to be seen in relation to each other more easily.Less
Alpesh Patel seeks to re-invoke and re-work the term ‘Black Atlantic’ by suggesting the ‘Brown Atlantic’ as an actual and imaginary space that recognizes the specific colonial and postcolonial legacies that the United Kingdom and North America share. Interrogating the heteronormative and sexist logic of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and the intra-/inter-racial connections of the ‘Black/Brown Altantic’, Patel uses this methodological framework to look at queer South Asian diasporic subjectivities. The methodology demands that sexuality, ‘race’, notions of ‘diaspora’/home, gender, and class be considered together, which serves to denaturalize or expose power structures by making them visible, and allowing them to be seen in relation to each other more easily.
Carrie Noland
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226541105
- eISBN:
- 9780226541389
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226541389.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
In this book, I treat what I believe to be Cunningham’s greatest preoccupation: not chance but rather inevitability, not chilling neutrality but rather the heat of human bonds. Instead of focusing ...
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In this book, I treat what I believe to be Cunningham’s greatest preoccupation: not chance but rather inevitability, not chilling neutrality but rather the heat of human bonds. Instead of focusing solely on “the movement itself,” Cunningham in fact explored the way movements evoke intimate relationships and dramatic plots. By privileging this side of Cunningham—which has never been systematically examined—I go against the grain of the critical literature on his dances, a critical literature that has repeatedly compared his aesthetics to those of John Cage. While others have championed (or lamented) his posthumanism, his aesthetics of "indifference," his abstraction of the corporeal, and his refusal of meaning, I argue that his dances contain a plethora of moments in which archetypal human dramas are staged, desire and interest are multiplied, the human body is highly particularized, and gestures are saturated with meaning and affect. Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary will change the way we look at Cunningham's dances as well as the nature of his collaborations with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, and other members of his company.Less
In this book, I treat what I believe to be Cunningham’s greatest preoccupation: not chance but rather inevitability, not chilling neutrality but rather the heat of human bonds. Instead of focusing solely on “the movement itself,” Cunningham in fact explored the way movements evoke intimate relationships and dramatic plots. By privileging this side of Cunningham—which has never been systematically examined—I go against the grain of the critical literature on his dances, a critical literature that has repeatedly compared his aesthetics to those of John Cage. While others have championed (or lamented) his posthumanism, his aesthetics of "indifference," his abstraction of the corporeal, and his refusal of meaning, I argue that his dances contain a plethora of moments in which archetypal human dramas are staged, desire and interest are multiplied, the human body is highly particularized, and gestures are saturated with meaning and affect. Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary will change the way we look at Cunningham's dances as well as the nature of his collaborations with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, and other members of his company.
Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9789888390809
- eISBN:
- 9789888390441
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888390809.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age. In response to the proliferation of queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires, ...
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Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age. In response to the proliferation of queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires, especially as manifested online, this book explores extended, diversified, and transculturally informed fan communities and practices based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that have cultivated various forms of queerness. To right an imbalance in the scholarly literature on queer East Asia, this volume is weighted toward an exploration of queer elements of mainland Chinese fandoms that have been less often written about than more visible cultural elements in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Case studies drawn from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the flows among them include: the Chinese online Hetalia fandom; Chinese fans’ queer gossip on the American L-Word actress Katherine Moennig; Dongfang Bubai iterations; the HOCC fandom; cross-border fans of Li Yuchun; and Japaneseness in Taiwanese BL fantasies; among others.Less
Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age. In response to the proliferation of queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires, especially as manifested online, this book explores extended, diversified, and transculturally informed fan communities and practices based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that have cultivated various forms of queerness. To right an imbalance in the scholarly literature on queer East Asia, this volume is weighted toward an exploration of queer elements of mainland Chinese fandoms that have been less often written about than more visible cultural elements in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Case studies drawn from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the flows among them include: the Chinese online Hetalia fandom; Chinese fans’ queer gossip on the American L-Word actress Katherine Moennig; Dongfang Bubai iterations; the HOCC fandom; cross-border fans of Li Yuchun; and Japaneseness in Taiwanese BL fantasies; among others.
Peta Mayer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620597
- eISBN:
- 9781789629927
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620597.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac ...
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This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac (1984); her French Romantic art criticism in The Genius of the Future, Romanticism and its Discontents and Soundings; andthe queer nineteenth-century literary canon of the Romantics, Decadents and aesthetes including Stendhal, Baudelaire, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Karl-Joris Huysmans. It outlines the strange behaviour of the solitary yet homosocial ‘Brooknerine’ and her female friendships in the domestic fiction, and the mixed responses of Brookner’s early reception from 1980-2010 frequently organised by gender, temporal and heterosexual normativity which tethers behaviour to a unilateral historical context. Alternatively, Brookner’s performative Romanticism is delineated as a queer cross-historical, intertextual, temporal literary practice which combines nineteenth-century and contemporary behaviours, tropes, narrative devices and temporal periods to expand historical context and subject to cross gender and historical temporalities. The book’s queer lesbian, intertextual, cross-historical methodology is illuminated, along with its performing cast of Romantic personae of the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller.Less
This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac (1984); her French Romantic art criticism in The Genius of the Future, Romanticism and its Discontents and Soundings; andthe queer nineteenth-century literary canon of the Romantics, Decadents and aesthetes including Stendhal, Baudelaire, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Karl-Joris Huysmans. It outlines the strange behaviour of the solitary yet homosocial ‘Brooknerine’ and her female friendships in the domestic fiction, and the mixed responses of Brookner’s early reception from 1980-2010 frequently organised by gender, temporal and heterosexual normativity which tethers behaviour to a unilateral historical context. Alternatively, Brookner’s performative Romanticism is delineated as a queer cross-historical, intertextual, temporal literary practice which combines nineteenth-century and contemporary behaviours, tropes, narrative devices and temporal periods to expand historical context and subject to cross gender and historical temporalities. The book’s queer lesbian, intertextual, cross-historical methodology is illuminated, along with its performing cast of Romantic personae of the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller.
Peter A. Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9789888083268
- eISBN:
- 9789888313907
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888083268.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson’s pioneering study of an Asian gay ...
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First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson’s pioneering study of an Asian gay culture, Male Homosexuality in Thailand (1989). The hero of Jackson’s narrative is “Uncle Go”, pen-name of the sexually libertarian but avowedly heterosexual editor of a popular magazine, whose “agony uncle” columns in the 1970s provided unique spaces in the national press for Thailand’s gays, lesbians and transgenders (kathoeys) to speak for themselves in the public domain. By allowing the voices of alternative sexualities to be heard, Uncle Go emerged as Thailand’s first champion of gender equality and sexual rights. Peter Jackson translates and analyzes selected correspondence from Uncle Go’s advice columns, preserving and presenting important primary sources. In this new edition, Jackson expands his coverage to include not only letters from Thai gay men, but also those from lesbians and transgenders, thus capturing the full diversity of Thailand’s modern queer cultures at a key moment in their historical development when new understandings of sexual identity were first communicated to the wider community.Less
First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson’s pioneering study of an Asian gay culture, Male Homosexuality in Thailand (1989). The hero of Jackson’s narrative is “Uncle Go”, pen-name of the sexually libertarian but avowedly heterosexual editor of a popular magazine, whose “agony uncle” columns in the 1970s provided unique spaces in the national press for Thailand’s gays, lesbians and transgenders (kathoeys) to speak for themselves in the public domain. By allowing the voices of alternative sexualities to be heard, Uncle Go emerged as Thailand’s first champion of gender equality and sexual rights. Peter Jackson translates and analyzes selected correspondence from Uncle Go’s advice columns, preserving and presenting important primary sources. In this new edition, Jackson expands his coverage to include not only letters from Thai gay men, but also those from lesbians and transgenders, thus capturing the full diversity of Thailand’s modern queer cultures at a key moment in their historical development when new understandings of sexual identity were first communicated to the wider community.
Susan Potter
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042461
- eISBN:
- 9780252051302
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042461.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to ...
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This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.Less
This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.
Yetta Howard
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252041884
- eISBN:
- 9780252050572
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041884.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, ...
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Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, sexual, and ethnic differences. Ugliness, in this book, is a multipronged concept: it equates with the disagreeable and pejorative traits that are attributed to queerness; it aligns itself with nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual physicality and experience; and it refers to anti-aesthetic textual practices, which are located in/as underground culture. This study shows how late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts of ugliness register discontent with culturally normative models of queerness and why the underground is necessary for articulating difference. Locating ugliness at the intersections of the physical, experiential, and textual, the book’s central claim is that queer female sexuality needs to be understood as ugliness and the repertoire of underground cultural practices becomes its obligatory archive. In Ugly Differences, accounting for a minoritarian queerness associated with gender, sexual, and ethnic differences requires turning to marginal forms and, as reflecting ugliness, these forms provide options outside heteronormative modes of being that open up possibilities for envisioning deeply counterintuitive domains of queer world-making.Less
Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, sexual, and ethnic differences. Ugliness, in this book, is a multipronged concept: it equates with the disagreeable and pejorative traits that are attributed to queerness; it aligns itself with nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual physicality and experience; and it refers to anti-aesthetic textual practices, which are located in/as underground culture. This study shows how late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts of ugliness register discontent with culturally normative models of queerness and why the underground is necessary for articulating difference. Locating ugliness at the intersections of the physical, experiential, and textual, the book’s central claim is that queer female sexuality needs to be understood as ugliness and the repertoire of underground cultural practices becomes its obligatory archive. In Ugly Differences, accounting for a minoritarian queerness associated with gender, sexual, and ethnic differences requires turning to marginal forms and, as reflecting ugliness, these forms provide options outside heteronormative modes of being that open up possibilities for envisioning deeply counterintuitive domains of queer world-making.
Christopher Pullen
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748694846
- eISBN:
- 9781474418485
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694846.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Exploring the archetypal representation of the straight girl with the queer guy in film and television culture from 1948 to the present day, Straight Girls and Queer Guys considers the process of the ...
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Exploring the archetypal representation of the straight girl with the queer guy in film and television culture from 1948 to the present day, Straight Girls and Queer Guys considers the process of the ‘hetero media gaze’ and the way it contextualizes sexual diversity and gender identity. Offering both an historical foundation and a rigorous conceptual framework, Christopher Pullen draws on a range of case studies, including the films of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, the performances of Kenneth Williams, televisions shows such as Glee, Sex and the City and Will and Grace, the work of Derek Jarman, and the role of the gay best friend in Hollywood film. Critiquing the representation of the straight girl and the queer guy for its relation to both power and otherness, this is a provocative study that frames a theoretical model which can be applied across diverse media forms.Less
Exploring the archetypal representation of the straight girl with the queer guy in film and television culture from 1948 to the present day, Straight Girls and Queer Guys considers the process of the ‘hetero media gaze’ and the way it contextualizes sexual diversity and gender identity. Offering both an historical foundation and a rigorous conceptual framework, Christopher Pullen draws on a range of case studies, including the films of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, the performances of Kenneth Williams, televisions shows such as Glee, Sex and the City and Will and Grace, the work of Derek Jarman, and the role of the gay best friend in Hollywood film. Critiquing the representation of the straight girl and the queer guy for its relation to both power and otherness, this is a provocative study that frames a theoretical model which can be applied across diverse media forms.
Emanuel Levy
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231152761
- eISBN:
- 9780231526531
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231152761.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of ...
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Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of view. For most of the twentieth century, gay characters and gay themes were both underrepresented and misrepresented in mainstream cinema. Since the 1970s, however, a new generation of openly gay directors has turned the closet inside out, bringing a poignant immediacy to modern cinema and popular culture. Combining his experienced critique with in-depth interviews, Emanuel Levy draws a clear timeline of gay filmmaking over the past four decades and its particular influences and innovations. While recognizing the “queering” of American culture that resulted from these films, Levy also takes stock of the ensuing conservative backlash and its impact on cinematic art, a trend that continues alongside a growing acceptance of homosexuality. He compares the similarities and differences between the “North American” attitudes of Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and John Waters and the “European” perspectives of Pedro Almodóvar and Terence Davies, developing a truly expansive approach to gay filmmaking and auteur cinema.Less
Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of view. For most of the twentieth century, gay characters and gay themes were both underrepresented and misrepresented in mainstream cinema. Since the 1970s, however, a new generation of openly gay directors has turned the closet inside out, bringing a poignant immediacy to modern cinema and popular culture. Combining his experienced critique with in-depth interviews, Emanuel Levy draws a clear timeline of gay filmmaking over the past four decades and its particular influences and innovations. While recognizing the “queering” of American culture that resulted from these films, Levy also takes stock of the ensuing conservative backlash and its impact on cinematic art, a trend that continues alongside a growing acceptance of homosexuality. He compares the similarities and differences between the “North American” attitudes of Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and John Waters and the “European” perspectives of Pedro Almodóvar and Terence Davies, developing a truly expansive approach to gay filmmaking and auteur cinema.
Gian Maria Annovi
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231180306
- eISBN:
- 9780231542708
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231180306.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Before his mysterious murder in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini had become famous—and infamous—not only for his groundbreaking films and literary works but also for his homosexuality and criticism of ...
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Before his mysterious murder in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini had become famous—and infamous—not only for his groundbreaking films and literary works but also for his homosexuality and criticism of capitalism, colonialism, and Western materialism. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship, Gian Maria Annovi revisits Pasolini's oeuvre to examine the author's performance as a way of assuming an antagonistic stance toward forms of artistic, social, and cultural oppression. Annovi connects Pasolini's notion of authorship to contemporary radical artistic practices and today's multimedia authorship. Annovi considers the entire range of Pasolini's work, including his poetry, narrative and documentary film, dramatic writings, and painting, as well as his often scandalous essays on politics, art, literature, and theory. He interprets Pasolini's multimedia authorial performance as a masochistic act to elicit rejection, generate hostility, and highlight the contradictions that structure a repressive society. Annovi shows how questions of authorial self-representation and self-projection relate to the artist's effort to undermine the assumptions of his audience and criticize the conformist practices that the culture industry and mass society impose on the author. Pasolini reveals the critical potential of his spectacular celebrity by using the author's corporeal or vocal presence to address issues of sexuality and identity, and through his strategic self-fashioning in films, paintings, and photographic portraits he destabilizes the audience's assumptions about the author.Less
Before his mysterious murder in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini had become famous—and infamous—not only for his groundbreaking films and literary works but also for his homosexuality and criticism of capitalism, colonialism, and Western materialism. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship, Gian Maria Annovi revisits Pasolini's oeuvre to examine the author's performance as a way of assuming an antagonistic stance toward forms of artistic, social, and cultural oppression. Annovi connects Pasolini's notion of authorship to contemporary radical artistic practices and today's multimedia authorship. Annovi considers the entire range of Pasolini's work, including his poetry, narrative and documentary film, dramatic writings, and painting, as well as his often scandalous essays on politics, art, literature, and theory. He interprets Pasolini's multimedia authorial performance as a masochistic act to elicit rejection, generate hostility, and highlight the contradictions that structure a repressive society. Annovi shows how questions of authorial self-representation and self-projection relate to the artist's effort to undermine the assumptions of his audience and criticize the conformist practices that the culture industry and mass society impose on the author. Pasolini reveals the critical potential of his spectacular celebrity by using the author's corporeal or vocal presence to address issues of sexuality and identity, and through his strategic self-fashioning in films, paintings, and photographic portraits he destabilizes the audience's assumptions about the author.
Sandra Patton-Imani
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479865567
- eISBN:
- 9781479866595
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479865567.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Queering Family Trees explores the lived experience of family-making among queer mothers in the United States between 1991 and 2015. While the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption has ...
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Queering Family Trees explores the lived experience of family-making among queer mothers in the United States between 1991 and 2015. While the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption has provided avenues toward equality for some couples, structural and economic barriers have meant that others—especially queer women of color who often have fewer financial resources—are not, in practice, able to avail themselves of supports necessary to create and sustain their families. This interdisciplinary ethnographic research draws on interviews with Indigenous, African American, Latina, Asian American, and white queer mothers living in a range of US states, considered in relation to news media, public law, and policy debates. I apply a reproductive justice analysis, critically exploring the ways intersections of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation shape the experiences of families navigating social and legal contexts that define queer families as “illegitimate.” I explore these debates in relation to policy changes in adoption, welfare, and immigration, making evident how same-sex marriage furthers a neoliberal economic agenda. Little mainstream or scholarly attention has been given to the lives and families of lesbians of color. Indeed, the erasure of queers of color from these debates was crucial to maintaining a narrative equating marriage with equality. The family-making narratives of these mothers challenge the assimilation versus resistance framework that has shaped understandings of LGBTQ marriage debates. I argue that, contrary to public narratives celebrating equality through marriage, the federal legalization of same-sex marriage reinforces existing structures of inequality grounded in race, gender, sexuality, and class.Less
Queering Family Trees explores the lived experience of family-making among queer mothers in the United States between 1991 and 2015. While the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption has provided avenues toward equality for some couples, structural and economic barriers have meant that others—especially queer women of color who often have fewer financial resources—are not, in practice, able to avail themselves of supports necessary to create and sustain their families. This interdisciplinary ethnographic research draws on interviews with Indigenous, African American, Latina, Asian American, and white queer mothers living in a range of US states, considered in relation to news media, public law, and policy debates. I apply a reproductive justice analysis, critically exploring the ways intersections of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation shape the experiences of families navigating social and legal contexts that define queer families as “illegitimate.” I explore these debates in relation to policy changes in adoption, welfare, and immigration, making evident how same-sex marriage furthers a neoliberal economic agenda. Little mainstream or scholarly attention has been given to the lives and families of lesbians of color. Indeed, the erasure of queers of color from these debates was crucial to maintaining a narrative equating marriage with equality. The family-making narratives of these mothers challenge the assimilation versus resistance framework that has shaped understandings of LGBTQ marriage debates. I argue that, contrary to public narratives celebrating equality through marriage, the federal legalization of same-sex marriage reinforces existing structures of inequality grounded in race, gender, sexuality, and class.
Penelope Deutscher
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231176415
- eISBN:
- 9780231544559
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231176415.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality ...
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In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the politicization of reproduction. By analyzing Foucault's contribution to the politics of maternity and its influence on the work of thinkers such as Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, Deutscher provides new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.Less
In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the politicization of reproduction. By analyzing Foucault's contribution to the politics of maternity and its influence on the work of thinkers such as Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, Deutscher provides new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.
Mandy Merck (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719099564
- eISBN:
- 9781526109767
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719099564.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Moving images of the British monarchy, in fact and fiction, are almost as old as the moving image itself, dating back to an 1895 dramatic vignette, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Led by Queen ...
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Moving images of the British monarchy, in fact and fiction, are almost as old as the moving image itself, dating back to an 1895 dramatic vignette, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Led by Queen Victoria, British monarchs themselves appeared in the new “animated photography” from 1896. Half a century later, the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II was a milestone in the adoption of television, watched by 20 million Britons and 100 million North Americans. At the century’s end, Princess Diana’s funeral was viewed by 2.5 billion worldwide. Seventeen essays by international commentators examine the portrayal of royalty in the “actuality” picture, the early extended feature, amateur cinema, the movie melodrama, the Commonwealth documentary, New Queer Cinema, TV current affairs, the big screen ceremonial and the post-historical boxed set. These contributors include Ian Christie, Elisabeth Bronfen, Andrew Higson, Steven Fielding, Karen Lury, Glyn Davis, Ann Gray, Jane Landman, Victoria Duckett, Jude Cowan Montague, James Downs, Barbara Straumann, Deirdre Gilfedder, Jo Stephenson, Ruth Adams, Erin Bell, Basil Glynn and Nicola Rehling.Less
Moving images of the British monarchy, in fact and fiction, are almost as old as the moving image itself, dating back to an 1895 dramatic vignette, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Led by Queen Victoria, British monarchs themselves appeared in the new “animated photography” from 1896. Half a century later, the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II was a milestone in the adoption of television, watched by 20 million Britons and 100 million North Americans. At the century’s end, Princess Diana’s funeral was viewed by 2.5 billion worldwide. Seventeen essays by international commentators examine the portrayal of royalty in the “actuality” picture, the early extended feature, amateur cinema, the movie melodrama, the Commonwealth documentary, New Queer Cinema, TV current affairs, the big screen ceremonial and the post-historical boxed set. These contributors include Ian Christie, Elisabeth Bronfen, Andrew Higson, Steven Fielding, Karen Lury, Glyn Davis, Ann Gray, Jane Landman, Victoria Duckett, Jude Cowan Montague, James Downs, Barbara Straumann, Deirdre Gilfedder, Jo Stephenson, Ruth Adams, Erin Bell, Basil Glynn and Nicola Rehling.
Jing Jamie Zhao
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9789888390809
- eISBN:
- 9789888390441
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888390809.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian ...
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This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian character in the television series The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009). Through a deconstructive reading of the gossip that imagines Moennig’s real-life lesbian gender identities and homoerotic relationships in one of the largest cross-cultural fandoms in Chinese cyberspace, The Garden of Eden (Yidianyuan), the author reveals that, rather than simply assimilating or rejecting the normative understandings of the West as a civilized, queer-friendly haven and China as a backward, heterocentric nation, the fans’ intricate fantasies about the Western queer world reflect their subjective, hybridized reappropriation and reinscription of the Chinese queer Occidentalist imaginations. Ultimately, she argues that the queer Occidentalism exemplified in this cross-cultural gossip functions as a survival strategy for queer fans to interrogate the depressing, heteropatriarchal realities in contemporary mainstream Chinese society.Less
This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian character in the television series The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009). Through a deconstructive reading of the gossip that imagines Moennig’s real-life lesbian gender identities and homoerotic relationships in one of the largest cross-cultural fandoms in Chinese cyberspace, The Garden of Eden (Yidianyuan), the author reveals that, rather than simply assimilating or rejecting the normative understandings of the West as a civilized, queer-friendly haven and China as a backward, heterocentric nation, the fans’ intricate fantasies about the Western queer world reflect their subjective, hybridized reappropriation and reinscription of the Chinese queer Occidentalist imaginations. Ultimately, she argues that the queer Occidentalism exemplified in this cross-cultural gossip functions as a survival strategy for queer fans to interrogate the depressing, heteropatriarchal realities in contemporary mainstream Chinese society.
