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This article offers a critical analysis of Matthew Baren’s 2018 film Extravaganza, a documentary about drag scenes in Shanghai. By focusing on some drag performers represented in this film, in tandem with an examination of the social and industry contexts of the film, as well as my interviews with the filmmaker and performers, I problematise the gender identity of the performers and the national identity of the film. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming’ and Song Hwee Lim’s discussion of ‘trans’, I propose to think about certain modes of transnational production with the critical concept of ‘becoming trans’. ‘Becoming trans’ offers a productive way of conceptualising new modes of ‘minor’ transnational cinematic connections in a globalised world without having to resort to identity politics.

The silence around queerness is decisively broken. Much has happened in the last two decades. Today, there are queer groups, writers, activists, academics, filmmakers, and an increasing number of spaces where friendship, solidarity, and political engagement can be nurtured. Queer activism has been responsible for bringing a legal challenge to Section 377 (IPC) that criminalizes “sexual acts against the order of nature”.

This book introduces the term "otherism" and looks at the discourse of otherism and the issue of otherness in South Asian religion, literature and film. It examines cultural questions related to the human condition of being the "other," of the process of "othering" and of the representation of "otherness" and its religious, cultural and ideological implications. The book applies the perspectives of ideological criticism, theories of hybridity, orientalism, nationalism, and gender and queer studies to gain new insights into the literature, film and culture of South Asia. It looks at the different ways of interpreting "otherness" today. The book goes on to analyze the ideological implications of the creation of "otherness" with regard to religious and cultural identity and the legitimation of power, as well as how the representation of "otherness" reflects the power structures of contemporary societies in South Asia. Offering a well-thought-out reflection on important cultural questions as well as a deep insight into the study of religion and "otherness" in South Asian literature and film, this book is a pioneering project that is of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies and South Asian religions, literatures and cultures.

Straight  Skin,  Gay  Masks  and  Pretending  to  Be  Gay  on  Screen  examines cinematic depictions  of  pretending-to-be-gay,  assessing  performances  that not only reflect heteronormative and explicitly homophobic attitudes, but also  offer  depictions  of  gay  selfhood with  more  nuanced  multidirectional identifications. The case of straight protagonists pretending to be gay on screen is the ideal context in which to study unanticipated progressivity and dissidence in regard to  cultural  construction  of  human sexualities  in  the  face  of  theatricalized epistemological collapse. Teasing apart the dynamics of depictions of both sexual  stability  and  fluidity  in  cinematic  images  of  men  pretending  to  be gay offers new insights into such salient issues as sexual vulnerability and dynamics  and  long-term  queer  visibility  in  a  politically  complicated  mass culture  which  is  mostly  produced  in  a  heteronormative  and  even  hostile cultural environment. Additionally, this book initially examines queer uses of sexuality masquerade in Alternate Gay World Cinema that allegorically features a world pretending to be gay, in which straights are harassed and persecuted, in order to expose the tragic consequences of sexual intolerance. Films  and  TV  series  examined  as  part  of  the  analysis  include  The  Gay Deceivers, Victor/Victoria, Happy Texas, William Friedkin’s Cruising and many other straight and gay screens. This  is  a  fascinating  and  important  study  relevant  to  students  and researchers in Film Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Sexuality Studies, Communication Studies and Cultural Studies.

Toni Morrison purportedly began her career as a novelist because she noticed a dearth of books about black women. As a result of this limitation, Morrison desired to write books “for people like [her], which is to say black people, curious people, demanding people—people who can’t be faked, people who don’t need to be patronized.”¹ Similarly the writer, director, and filmmaker Coquie Hughes (born Latasha Iva Hughes in Chicago in 1970) has produced narratives that feature an array of queer black women—“Girls Like Us” as she calls them in her web series—who are curious, demanding, flawed, and

At the 2012 Golden Globe awards, during her acceptance speech for the Best Actress award for her performance in The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2012), Meryl Streep gave a shout-out to Adepero Oduye for her role as Alike in Dee Rees’s feature film Pariah (2011). The sentiment behind this esteemed acknowledgment was that brilliant performances in important independent films were overlooked and deserved recognition. Streep would go on to win the Best Actress Oscar for a her portrayal of Britain’s first woman prime minister, the a ultraconservative Margaret Thatcher.

Shari Frilot is a filmmaker and curator whose creative practice has been driven by sustained explorations of sexuality, technology, desire, cosmic and subatomic structures, mixed-raced identity, and chaos. She has often expressed her modus operandi in the following terms: “It’s impossible to see a cloud when you’re in the middle of it. You have to move outside of the cloud to really get a sense of it.” By continually shifting between the outside and inside of a given framework—whether institutional or personal—Frilot has developed keen modes of challenging conventional structures for understanding and engaging the moving image.

I grew up on the West Side of Chicago, where it was infested with gangs and drugs and violence. But I was always the type of person that wanted to be better than my environment, and I was also the type of person that didn’t want people to underestimate me because of where I came from. And so I made up in my mind, even as a young child, that I wanted to be somebody. I love making movies. I’ve wanted to be who I am ever since I saw Sidney Lumet’s movie The Wiz (1978).

In mainstream media, gays and lesbians of color are either woefully present or predictably absent. The litany of black gay and lesbian characters in Hollywood films and network television reads like its own form of blackface. They range from the burly, black “bulldagger” as whore house madam in the 1933 film The Emperor Jones (starring Paul Robeson) to the predatory lesbian vamp in Spike Lee’s 1983 She’s Gotta Have It ; from Eddie Murphy’s ultracamp Miss Thing hairdresser on NBC’s Saturday Night Live to the snap! queen duo on Fox TV’s In Living Color. These relentless stereo types are part of

In 2005 Angela Robinson released her spy spoof, D.E.B.S. (2004). Robinson first realized the project as the short film D.E.B.S. (2003) through a training program with POWER UP (Professional Organization of Women in Entertainment Reaching Up), the only 501(c)(3) nonprofit film production company and educational organization for women and the GLBTQ community. In 2005 she also became the second black woman and first black lesbian to direct a studio feature, the Disney film Herbie Fully Loaded starring Lindsay Lohan. This moment marked the beginning of the black lesbian media maker hyphenate as Angela Robinson moved to television and began working on The L Word as a writer, director, and eventually producer. Patricia White's essay in this section, "'Invite Me In!': Angela Robinson at the Hollywood Threshold," offers an in-depth exploration of her career trajectory.

The Mammy has been in our field of vision as a popular icon representing black womanhood for more than a century in literature, film, and television and in consumer and material culture.¹ Described as an asexual, rotund slave of older age whose sole responsibility is to take care of her master’s children, Mammy is a beloved character who represents all that is nurturing and maternal. She is dark-skinned and boisterous and thought to have mannish features such as large feet and hands. Mammy wears a large skirt, hiding her sex, and covers her nappy hair with a bandanna or handkerchief.

The writer examines Singapore's Media Development Authority's censorship of representations of lesbianism in film, music video, television and theatre. She highlights the government surveillance and repression of portrayals of LGBT cultures and communities in Singapore by unpacking the ambiguities and contradictions underlying the censorship of these popular media forms. This reflects an institutional ‘inability to read lesbians’.

The unprecedented increase in lesbian representation over the past two decades has, paradoxically, coincided with queer theory’s radical transformation of the study of sexuality. In Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, Clara Bradbury-Rance argues that this contradictory context has yielded new kinds of cinematic language through which to give desire visual form. By offering close readings of key contemporary films such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Water Lilies and Carol alongside a broader filmography encompassing over 300 other films released between 1927 and 2018, the book provokes new ways of understanding a changing field of representation. Bradbury-Rance resists charting a narrative of representational progress or shoring up the lesbian’s categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible. Instead, she argues for a feminist framework that can understand lesbianism’s queerness. Drawing on a provocative theoretical and visual corpus, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory reveals the conditions of lesbian legibility in the twenty-first century.

Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. This collection of essays asks to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood’s task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly undermine their inherent ideology by opening a field of conflicting and competing intersecting identities? The challenge set out in this volume is to revisit well-known films in search for a narrative not exclusively constituted by the Hollywood formula and to answer the questions: What lies beyond the frame? What elements contradict a film’s sustained illusion of a normative world? Where do films betray their own ideology and most importantly what intersectional spaces of identity do they reveal or conceal?

This article discusses two recent works by emerging documentary auteur Zhao Liang, Crime and Punishment(2007) and Petition(2009). These penetrating observations of state-society relations in contemporary China render visible those who are un(der)represented, critique the deception of mass media images, and show the various complex ways in which power is connected to surveillance and visibility. Thus the filmmaker, his camera, and the spectators are implicated in power relationships as we cast voyeuristic, panoptic, activist, empathetic, or critical gazes upon the representatives of state power and upon the disenfranchised.

This chapter contemplates the ethical dimensions of the specific brand of observational cinema found in China. Because there is no popular understanding of independent documentary—and also because filmmakers almost invariably use amateur video cameras and shoot alone—many subjects are oblivious to the fact that their images are being captured for films being screened around the world. It is in this sense that, while their cameras are perfectly visible, they are also hidden. This enables directors to capture “life unawares,” as if people were being shot by a hidden camera. In this context, directors make the films they want, ignoring the ethical implications of shooting people without being upfront about their intentions or asking for consent. The chapter closely examines a set of films to explore the axiographics of the documentary, in other words how ethics is rendered in the time and space of the moving image.

In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. This digital turn has given us a 'DV China' that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups. This study takes stock of these phenomena by surveying the social and cultural landscape of grassroots and alternative cinema practices.

In their introduction to a collaborative study of crowds organized by the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000, Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews observe that while the first half of the twentieth century witnessed a rise of collective social action and various forms of mass assembly, the second half was a period of the decline of collective political formations and the replacement by virtual and media-based assemblies for physical crowds (Schnapp and Tiews 2006, xi). The postindustrial political economy in the West is “characterized by the coexistence of media aggregation and bodily disaggregation,” Schnapp and Tiews claim (xi).

At the closing awards ceremony for the 7th Annual DOChina Festival held in May 2010 in Songzhuang—a gentrified artists’ village at the far eastern edge of the Beijing municipality—young animator, poet, and filmmaker Xue Jianqiang was recognized with an honorable mention for his haunting documentary Martian Syndrome. The award came with 2000 RMB, a Panasonic DV camera (the jury’s official comments noted that Xue lacked his own camcorder and had to borrow one to make his film), and the chance to speak before a gathering of who’s who in Chinese independent documentary filmmaking.

Film scholarship on the movie-making, movie-viewing, and movie-circulating practices that have developed since the mid-1990s in China has appropriately emphasized the role played by the rise of digital video (DV) and its impact on independent and, in particular, documentary filmmaking. In this chapter, I want to explore one line of development in DV independent production that has received much less attention—what I call animateur cinema—which concerns short digital animations that are made by and/or circulated for online (or on-mobile) moviemakers/viewers. Fan-originated digital animation or egao animation can also be found online, but my focus is on animateur cinema