“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withdrawn in 1968 during CRM; replaced by the PG rating system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)