Abstract
There is something peculiarly queer about theory. It is an erotically sentient enterprise because it at once reaches for the abstract and the material. Not unlike the cinema, theory renders the mobile, the malleable, and the inexpressible. A philosophy of queer film, therefore, involves desire. How do we account for its historical unfolding? What filmmakers and critics opened the cinema to a queer experience? The makers and writers discussed below, deliver a theory of “queer” cinema that involves experimentation, “imaging,” and critical engagement with ideology (the abstract) and bodies (the material). In short, it involves movement. Like the queer philosophy it evokes for filmmakers and critics alike, the cinema transforms time and space—aesthetically, politically, and culturally.
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Notes
- 1.
D. N. Rodowick. Elegy for Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, xiii.
- 2.
Matthew Tinkcom, Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 6.
- 3.
See Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 9). On Derridean theory and cinema, see Peter Brunette’s and David Willis’s Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989) and Tom Conley’s essay, “Site and Sound,” Modern Language Notes 121 (2006): 851–61.
- 4.
B. Ruby Rich, “New Queer Cinema,” in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. Michele Aaron (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 15–22; 17 (emphasis added).
- 5.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 25.
- 6.
Tinkcom, Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain, 11.
- 7.
Teresa De Laurtetis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, An Introduction,” differences 3.2 (1991): iii–xviii, iii (emphasis added).
- 8.
Bad Object-Choice Collective, ed. How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991).
- 9.
“In Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,” Kaja Silverman explains in The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), Lacan “insists emphatically upon the disjunction of camera and eye, but instead of deploying the camera as an independent optical apparatus, he uses it as a signifier of the gaze. The passage in which he introduces this metaphor locates the subject firmly within spectacle, and attributes to the camera/gaze a constitutive function with respect to him or her” (131). As it turns out, “the gaze would thus seem to be as old as sociality itself ” (132).
- 10.
Alexander Doty, Review of How Do I Look? Film Quarterly 46.1 (1992): 36–37. It is worth noting, furthermore, that Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is not once cited in the 1991 issue of Differences that de Lauretis edited. Butler’s well-known book, published in the year the Santa Cruz conference took place, is oft recognized as the launch pad for queer theory more generally. Around matters of imaging queer sexualities, however, de Lauretis had already envisaged a paradigm shift for gay and lesbian studies in film and video.
- 11.
See, for instance, Jean Epstein’s Ganymède, essai sur l’éthique homosexuelle masculine (Écrits complets, Volume III, 1928–1938. Paris: Independencia Éditions, 2014). Christophe Wall-Romana’s introduction to this volume, as well as his essay, “Epstein’s Photogénie as Corporeal Vision: Inner Sensation, QueerEmbodiment, and Ethics,” importantly links the filmmaker’s homosexuality with his filmmaking (in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul’s Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012; 51–71). For his elaboration on cinematic “pansexuality”—a book originally published in 1972—see Parker Tyler’s Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993). Eisenstein’s film ¡Que Viva Mexico! is the most direct exploration of homosexual/homoerotic desire through his filmmaking, although Strike! and Battleship Potemkin also hold their own in this regard. Peter Greenaway’s film, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, drives the point home (on this, see Gerstner’s “In Excess of the Cut: Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato” (Los Angeles Review of Books April 15, 2016: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/in-excess-of-the-cut-peter-greenaways-eisenstein-in-guanajuato/)).
- 12.
Williams, for instance, highlights Dulac’s L’Invitation au voyage (1927): “heterosexual and homosexual longing, feminine passivity versus illicit desire, are set in opposition and rendered through metaphors of transport (taxi, ships, dance), orientalist exoticism (musicality, associative superimpositions), looking patterns (homosociality/homoeroticism, direct camera), authorial intertextuality, and rhythmic abstraction” (Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014; 149). On Arzner, see Judith Mayne’s Directed by Dorothy Arzner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
- 13.
See Gloria Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza [1987]. 3rd Edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007). For a discussion about and specific reference to Anzaladúa’s use of cinematic language in Borderlands, see my Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 219–20.
- 14.
See Gerstner, Queer Pollen, chapter two.
- 15.
My shortlist is obviously not meant to be comprehensive. Since libraries have fruitfully put digital-age technology to excellent use by creating resource guides by subject area, and to provide a current link to research, I include one library’s offering for studies in queer theory: http://fordham.libguides.com/c.php?g=354894&p=3004496
- 16.
https://www.avert.org/professionals/history-hiv-aids/overview (accessed June 24, 2017).
- 17.
Originally published as an issue of October (AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. 43 (Winter 1987)), the volume was republished with the same title through MIT Press.
- 18.
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” In October 43 (1988): 197–222.
- 19.
Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (winter 1989): 3–18.
- 20.
Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture. David A. Gerstner, ed. (London: Routledge, 2006). “Thematic List of Entries” provides a comprehensive list of film-and-video-related topics that are useful signposts for the discussion here (see pp. xxiv–xxvi).
- 21.
Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, with Meta Mazaj, eds. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 708.
- 22.
Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1988), 318.
- 23.
See Elizabeth Cowie’s Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Silverman’s contributions are many in this area. For now, see The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
- 24.
Along with Edelman’s works cited above, see Lauren Berlant’s Desire/Love (Brooklyn: Puntum Books, 2012). “For de Lauretis,” Berlant rightly tells us, “the fetishistic ‘perversion’ of lesbian desire is productive, not destructive, of love” (41).
- 25.
Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 150.
- 26.
This is, of course, a critique of Laura Mulvey’s cornerstone essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which the cinematic apparatus and its attendant spectator are always already male. Steven Neale and others questioned the concept that all men’s desire could be simplified as the same (i.e., heterosexual). See Steven Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Screen 24.6 (1983): 2–17.
- 27.
Viewed this way, Foucault’s import for queer theorists becomes strikingly clear. The relationships between power and knowledge and discipline and punish, are the crucial tensions where the subject discovers pleasure. Foucault’s homosexuality, lived-world experimentation with sex, and death by AIDS made him, as David M. Halperin puts it, “Saint Foucault.” Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
- 28.
See, The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, ed. Matt Bell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). Bell’s introduction to the collection is an invaluable overview of the decade-long transformation of the critical discourse around the play and the film.
- 29.
The textual ronde described here derives from Bakhtin’s concept of “author creator”: The work of art, he writes, is a “single but complex event that we might call the work in the totality of all its events [including] the giveness of the work, and its text, and the world represented in the text, and the author-creator, and the listener or reader.” “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, eds. Carly Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 255.
- 30.
Matthew Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 4; emphasis in original.
- 31.
I play on, first, Thomas Elsaesser’s subheading “Where Freud Left His Marx in the American Home” from his seminal essay “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” (in, among other places, Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 68–91); and, second, Élisabeth Roudinesco’s opening statement for the preface of Jacques Lacan: “Jacques Lacan sought to bring plague, subversion, and disorder to the moderate Freudianism of his time.” Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xv.
- 32.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 9.
- 33.
While Hazareesingh reminds us time and again that paradox represents French thought tout court, he hastily dismisses Derrida’s writing as a “dead-end alley.” This is especially unfortunate just as queer theory and cultural studies make headway in French academic settings. Many non-queer writers miss the queer significance of Derridean écriture (as well as other interventions made by notables such as Lacan, Althusser, and so on). We are, as the black queer James Baldwin consistently confirmed, “in trouble with language again.”
- 34.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983), 34.
- 35.
Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1.
- 36.
Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, “Introduction: Transgender Studies 2.0” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 6.
- 37.
Quoted in Stryker and Aizura, 6.
- 38.
In the premier issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1. 1–2 (2014): 86–89, Helen Hok-Sze Leung contributes a handy overview in the “Keywords” section that covers film. Smartly presented by subsections—for example, “Critically Trans,” “Trans Auteurs”—Leung takes as her point of departure the “deceptively simple question”: “What counts as a Trans Film?” Her outline in TSQ reminds us that the response is, indeed, not so simple. More recently, Cael M. Keegan expands on a cinematic concept, “*trans,” to explore Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s filmmaking (Lana and Lily Wachowski. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
- 39.
In her writing on film, Halberstam does turn to the work of feminist-film theory, specifically psychoanalysis in relation to suture. Because the terms “gaze” and “look” are often conflated in the writing, it is difficult to know where the corporeality of the look is distinct from the ideological implications of the gaze. Nonetheless, suture theory opens promising avenues for questioning the way cinematic form and representation entangle (if not disentangle) the relation between gendered body and ideology. See, along with the articles in Stryker et al., chapter four (“The Transgender Look”) in In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); “Skinflick: Posthuman Gender in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs,” Camera Obscura 3.27 (September 1991): 36–53.
- 40.
Eliza Steinbock, “Groping Theory: Haptic Cinema and Trans-Curiosity in Hans Scheirl’s Dandy Dust,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, 101–118.
- 41.
The film, Community Action Center (Burns and Steiner 2010), is noteworthy in this context. Called a “sociosexual video,” we partake in sexual romps where multiple variations of bodies and sexual pleasure take place. The Video Data Bank website joyfully describes the project: “This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, such as works by Fred Halsted, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes, and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler” (http://www.vdb.org/titles/community-action-center; accessed July 3, 2017).
- 42.
Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73.
- 43.
Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996): 108–28, 115–16 (emphasis in original).
- 44.
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 52–53.
- 45.
Peter Bürger, “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde,” New Literary Criticism 41 (2010): 695–715, 705 (emphasis added).
- 46.
Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston. AIDS Demographics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 20.
- 47.
Pat Hackett, ed. The Andy Warhol Diaries (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 180.
- 48.
Launched in 2011, There’s No Place … involves a trilogy of multimedia performances and installation projects: Army of Revolt, Friends of Dorothy (Judy Garland Screen Test), and Friends of Dorothy (Diana Ross Screen Test).
- 49.
In an important footnote, Derrida defines his understanding of sous rature this way: “It is a common error to equate the phenomenological reduction, ‘putting out of play,’ and the sous rature, ‘putting under erasure’ …. The distinction is simple: The gesture of bracketing implies ‘not this but that,’ preserving a bipolarity as well as a hierarchy of empirical impurity and phenomenological purity; the gesture of sous rature implies ‘both this and that’ as well as ‘neither this nor that’ undoing the opposition and the hierarchy between the legible and the erased.” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 374–75, fn 34.
- 50.
Brian Currid, “Disco and Dance Music,” in Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2, George Haggerty, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 256 (emphasis added).
- 51.
Maria San Philippo, The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 4.
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Gerstner, D.A. (2019). How Do We Look So Far? Notes Toward a Queer-Film Philosophy. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_30
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