• “the best queer films you didn’t know were queer” → “if homosexuality never crosses the viewer’s mind, is the film still queer?”
• defining queerness in media/delineating it as open-ended as queer theory and fluidity of gender and sexuality
  • Dorothy Arzner (by Judith Mayne): no overt lesbians or lesbianism, but an equal dedication to detail to the actions of women and men
  • Alexander Doty: queerness is “less an essential, waiting-to-be-discovered property than the result of acts of production or reception”; queerness can be attributed to the interpretation of a viewer as much as it can be to the existence of queer actions in the media itself
  • Richard Dyer: “In the process of investigation, the by, for, and about category frays at the edges.”
  • scrutinize and deconstruct categories; avoiding applying labels, perverse presentism
• media is representative, subjective, and prone to pathos and artistic recreation; all media is biased from the views of its creators, and all media has intention
• definitions of media (film)
  • form: how a story is expressed
  • vs. content: plotline and elements
• tropes
  • Bury Your Gays: “the persistent, minimally varying association of queerness with unnatural death is reductive and harmful in much the same way that the automatic association of HIV/AIDS with male homosexuality is reductive and harmful”
  • tropes lead into surface level representation for many minorities

history of media representation

• Hays Code
  • Motion Picture Production Code
  • 1930s prohibition on moral content and mature subject matter which reduced the representation of homosexuals in film
  • representation before code included:
    • caricatures of gay and lesbian communities which represented Krafft-Ebing’s inversion
    • shock-values of unprecedented homosexual perversion
  • 1933: ban on male homosexuality
  • 1950s: McCarthyism era → homophobia in the time of the Red Scare
    • homosexuals in real life were discriminated; homosexuals in media designated as villains or mentally ill
      • The Celluloid Closet
  • withdrawn in 1968 during CRM; replaced by the PG rating system
    • Vito Russo: weaponized against queer portrayals as “obscene”
    • vs. 1958: neutral or positive homosexual content was not inherently obscene: vs. pornographic labels and discrimination
• GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation)
• underground iconoclastic cinema: performance art, expiremental films
  • Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Barbara Hammer
• various movements
  • 1940s–1950s: Camp movement
    • post-WWII movement
    • “privileges poor taste, shock value, and irony, intentionally challenging the traditional attributes of high art”
    • showiness, manmade artificiality, and tackiness
    • John Waters
  • New Queer Cinema
    • independent films and focuses on experimental work
    • “pastiche and appropriation”; music video influence
    • overt queerness and focusing on queerness
  • mainstream queerness through representation in the 2000s–present
    • Ellen DeGeneres → late 1990s and early 2000s increase in LGBTQ+ representation: Will and Grace
    • “the representation of certain safe forms of nonheterosexuality appealed to straight audiences among growing discourses of liberal tolerance”; “the existence and distribution of film is a business decision”, profit
    • RuPaul Charles
• streaming services enhance interest in queer content due to removing the necessity to show physical/public interest in consuming it
• large followings through social media; Youtube
• criticism on various representations in film
  • coming out and the necessity of coming out; the framing and form of coming out in film
    • shock value callback?
  • homonormativity: bounds and regulation of queerness
  • bisexual erasure in media and ciswashing

queer cinema and queerness in cinema

• queer cinema: focusing on auteurs, forms, and reception
  • made by queers about queerness and embraced by queers
• further definitions of film
  • encoding: messages implemented by a creator
  • decoding: messages interpreted by the audience
• how are representations of queer lives constructed? what complex realities do they depict? what biases or blind spots remain?
  • in contemporaneous films and media
• Monster
  • 2003, Jenkins
  • Aileen Wuronos
  • conflict of “man-hating lesbian” and “psychopathic homosexual” trope to intersectionality and contextual reasoning
  • pathology of normativity for queer individuals through Wuronos’s relationship and conflicts
• Unveiled
  • 2005, Maccarone
  • intersectionality and discrimination against LGBTQ; nuance of LGBTQ lives
  • not demonizing a repressive country when a “progressive” country denies in the same media
  • intersectional view of sexuality, gender, and class: posing as an identity with entirely different nuances and intersectional identity
  • Fremde Haut: “strange skin”; covering and masking, and veiling to pulp sensational novels
    • • foil/contrasting butch-femme identities, nods to pulp fiction and popular film
• Shrek 2
  • heteronormative tropes and patriarchal imagery of Shrek vs. central “coming out” trope and queer themes of Shrek 2
  • acceptance of openly out characters
  • personal view with a friend: “wait this isn't about the transphobic wolf this is about the interpretation of shrek and co as outsiders relative to how one would see queer communities and societal attempts to normalize them by their standards” “you know what i acquiesce because i think the largest draw for me as a shrek 2 respecter is the potion at the crux of the movie and the transformation” “i really think theres something worth pointing out they couldve argued with the appeaarance conversion with all of the maain chars tbh; how it also affects fiona and donkey”
• intersectional conflicts and backlash
  • Fire, 1996, Mehta; moral panic in a “sexist, misogynist, and homophobic culture”
    • leading to further homosexual art, Girlfriend Bollywood moviee
  • Carol, 2015, Haynes
    • 20th century-accurate portrayals of queer identities and traumass, particularly wrt lesbianss
    • excluded from Best Picture in Academy Awards/Oscars
    • “Perhaps Haynes’s choice to make Carol, a film about queers before their attainment of some civil rights, is a stark reminder not only of how far we have come but of how fragile those rights are.”
• small-screen and streaming service television: higher criticism
  • large amounts of “normalizing” tropes in media in the 1990s (“golden age” for representation following Ellen)
  • increase in nuance and complexity of queer characterization following Ellen: Will and Grace, Queer as Folk
• “imperative of the happy ending”
  • criticized as the total inverse of the pathological, mentally ill/villainized depiction of queers
• Bechdel and Vito Russo tests
  • Vito Russo:
    • LGBTQ+ character
    • LGBTQ+ character with defining traits besides queerness
    • LGBTQ+ character integral to the plot
  • Bechdel
    • to a friend “ok hold on whats a media we both like that passes the bechdel test”
      • Signalis (2022) does
      • not Final Fantasy XV or Final Fantasy XVI
      • Final Fantasy XIV, barely
        • 10 year old mmo btw
          • “okay actually? let's be funnier here. How many expansions (in this case, counting an expansion as its base through .5x) of ffxiv pass the bechdel test” (contextually, it currently has 5)