front cover of Queer African Cinemas
Queer African Cinemas
Lindsey B. Green-Simms
Duke University Press, 2022
In Queer African Cinemas, Lindsey B. Green-Simms examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in an environment of increasing antiqueer violence, efforts to criminalize homosexuality, and other state-sanctioned homophobia. Green-Simms argues that these films not only record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience; they highlight how queer African cinematic practices contribute to imagining new hopes and possibilities. Examining globally circulating international art films as well as popular melodramas made for local audiences, Green-Simms emphasizes that in these films queer resistance—contrary to traditional narratives about resistance that center overt and heroic struggle—is often practiced from a position of vulnerability. By reading queer films alongside discussions about censorship and audiences, Green-Simms renders queer African cinema as a rich visual archive that documents the difficulty of queer existence as well as the potentials for queer life-building and survival.
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front cover of Queer Cinema in the World
Queer Cinema in the World
Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt
Duke University Press, 2016
Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.
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front cover of Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema
Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema
By David William Foster
University of Texas Press, 2003

Viewing contemporary Latin American films through the lens of queer studies reveals that many filmmakers are exploring issues of gender identity and sexual difference, as well as the homophobia that attempts to defeat any challenge to the heterosexual norms of patriarchal culture. In this study of queer issues in Latin American cinema, David William Foster offers highly perceptive queer readings of fourteen key films to demonstrate how these cultural products promote the principles of an antiheterosexist stance while they simultaneously disclose how homophobia enforces the norms of heterosexuality.

Foster examines each film in terms of the ideology of its narrative discourse, whether homoerotic desire or a critique of patriarchal heterosexism and its implications for Latin American social life and human rights. His analyses underscore the difficulties involved in constructing a coherent and convincing treatment of the complex issues involved in critiquing the patriarchy from perspectives associated with queer studies. The book will be essential reading for everyone working in queer studies and film studies.

The films discussed in this book are:

  • De eso no se habla (I Don't Want to Talk about It)
  • El lugar sin límites (The Place without Limits)
  • Aqueles dois (Those Two)
  • Convivencia (Living Together)
  • Conducta impropia (Improper Conduct)
  • The Disappearance of García Lorca
  • La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins)
  • Doña Herlinda y su hijo (Doña Herlinda and Her Son)
  • No se lo digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone)
  • En el paraíso no existe el dolor (There Is No Suffering in Paradise)
  • A intrusa (The Interloper)
  • Plata quemada (Burnt Money)
  • Afrodita (Aphrodite)
  • Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)
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front cover of Queer Timing
Queer Timing
The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema
Susan Potter
University of Illinois Press, 2019

John Leo and Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA), 2020

In Queer Timing, Susan Potter offers a counter-history that reorients accepted views of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema. Potter sees the emergence of lesbian figures as only the most visible but belated outcome of multiple sexuality effects. Early cinema reconfigured older erotic modalities, articulated new--though incoherent--sexual categories, and generated novel forms of queer feeling and affiliation.

Potter draws on queer theory, silent film historiography, feminist film analysis, and archival research to provide an original and innovative analysis. Taking a conceptually oriented approach, she articulates the processes of filmic representation and spectatorship that reshaped, marginalized, or suppressed women's same-sex desires and identities. As she pursues a sense of "timing," Potter stages scenes of the erotic and intellectual encounters shared by historical spectators, on-screen figures, and present-day scholars. The result is a daring revision of feminist and queer perspectives that foregrounds the centrality of women's same-sex desire to cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality.

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front cover of Questioning African Cinema
Questioning African Cinema
Conversations With Filmmakers
Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
The most comprehensive account available of filmmaking in Africa today. Diverse in their art, paradoxically more celebrated abroad than they are at home, African filmmakers eke out their visions against a backdrop of complex historical, social, economic, and political practices. The richness of their accomplishments emerges with compelling clarity in this book, in which African filmmakers speak candidly about their work. Featuring interviews with key personalities from twelve nations, Questioning African Cinema provides the most extensive, comprehensive account ever given of the origins, practice, and implications of filmmaking in Africa. Speaking with pioneers Med Hondo, Souleymane Cissé, and Kwaw Ansah; renowned feature filmmakers Djibril Mambéty, Haile Gerima, and Safi Faye; and award-winning younger filmmakers Idrissa Ouedraogo, Cheick Oumar Sissoko, and Jean-Pierre Bekolo, N. Frank Ukadike identifies trends and individual practices even as he surveys the evolution of African cinema and addresses the politics and problems of seeing Africa through an African lens. Situating the unique achievement of each filmmaker within the geographic, historical, social, and political context of African cinema, he also explores questions about acting, distribution and exhibition, history, theory and criticism, video-based television production, and television's relationship to independent film. N. Frank Ukadike is associate professor of film and of African and African diaspora studies at Tulane University.
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