The first book to focus on the connections between sexuality, activism, and documentary film.
From film festivals to university campuses, from private homes to first-run theaters, people everywhere are viewing and discussing gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, and transgender films and videos. Between the Sheets, In the Streets considers these videos and films, testifying to the unavoidable connections between sexuality (the sheets) and activism (the streets) for all who identify as gay, lesbian, or queer in the 1990s.
This first collection of essays to focus exclusively on queer, lesbian, and gay documentary argues that documentary films and videos speak with a sense of political and social urgency, acting as testaments to the importance of reclaiming history and asserting the importance of these points of view. Among the topics discussed are representations of young queers on such shows as MTV’s The Real World; pre-Stonewall films; portrayals of lesbians and aging; video activism in Oregon and the South; and the works of Derek Jarman, Su Friedrich, Cheryl Dunye, and Sadie Benning. A range of films and videos is examined, including Strangers in Good Company, Paris Is Burning, Juggling Gender, Silverlake Life, and Without You I’m Nothing.Tracing an exhilarating range of perspectives and subject positions, Between the Sheets, In the Streets is an essential guide to current developments in queer, lesbian, and gay documentary. Contributors: Chris Cagle, Brown U; Linda Dittmar, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Lynda Goldstein, Pennsylvania State U, Wilkes-Barre Campus; Ronald Gregg, Drake U; Janet Jakobsen, U of Arizona; Lynda McAfee, New York Public Library; Kathleen McHugh, U of California, Riverside; Beverly Seckinger, U of Arizona; Marc Siegel, UCLA; Chris Straayer, Tisch School of the Arts; Erika Suderburg, U of California, Riverside; Thomas Waugh, Concordia U, Montreal; Justin Wyatt, U of North Texas.Gopinath juxtaposes diverse texts to indicate the range of oppositional practices, subjectivities, and visions of collectivity that fall outside not only mainstream narratives of diaspora, colonialism, and nationalism but also most projects of liberal feminism and gay and lesbian politics and theory. She considers British Asian music of the 1990s alongside alternative media and cultural practices. Among the fictional works she discusses are V. S. Naipaul’s classic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Ismat Chughtai’s short story “The Quilt,” Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. Analyzing films including Deepa Mehta’s controversial Fire and Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, she pays particular attention to how South Asian diasporic feminist filmmakers have reworked Bollywood’s strategies of queer representation and to what is lost or gained in this process of translation. Gopinath’s readings are dazzling, and her theoretical framework transformative and far-reaching.
Moon illuminates the careers of James, Warhol, and others by examining the imaginative investments of their protogay childhoods in their work in ways that enable new, more complex cultural readings. He deftly engages notions of initiation and desire not within the traditional framework of “sexual orientation” but through the disorienting effects of imitation. Whether invoking the artist Joseph Cornell’s early fascination with the Great Houdini or turning his attention to James’s self-described “initiation into style” at the age of twelve—when he first encountered the homoerotic imagery in paintings by David, Géricault, and Girodet—Moon reveals how the works of these artists emerge from an engagement that is obsessive to the point of “queerness.”
Rich in historical detail and insistent in its melding of the recent with the remote, the literary with the visual, the popular with the elite, A Small Boy and Others presents a hitherto unimagined tradition of brave and outrageous queer invention. This long-awaited contribution from Moon will be welcomed by all those engaged in literary, cultural, and queer studies.
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