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In the 1990s I lived in New York City. I moved to New York City shortly after graduating from Oberlin College, in Ohio. I lived there for almost a de cade, and during that time I was very actively engaged in continuing my pursuit of a career in photography. Photography was my first form of visual art going back to junior high school. I enrolled in the New York University International Center for Photography master’s program because I really wanted to understand what it was to be a photographer. At that time I was very interested in street photography.

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).

Much has been written about Nina Simone’s song “Mississippi Goddam” because it lyrically achieves the political consciousness of the embattled community whose experiences and energy it intends to speak to, through, and for. With its curse words, impatient tone, and energetic rhythm, it could never be mistaken for the traditional, Christian-inflected civil rights dirge. “Alabama’s got me so upset,” the chorus complains. “Tennessee made me lose my rest, and,” as if its atrocities need not be spelled out, “every body knows about Mississippi, goddam!” The song was banned from radio airplay but still became part of the civil rights sound

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.

Galt and Schoonover conceived and developed this book through a queer critical lens that invites questions and does not pretend to know—or desire to know—every possible outcome. Queer is neither adjective nor noun for Galt and Schoonover. Queer is a verb, and a transitive one at that. Queering the world and queering cinema studies are active processes in which Schoonover and Galt delight as theorists, historians, and consumers of media. To extend the travel metaphor a step further: they are intrepid, genial travel guides, and so much more.

Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ StudiesA profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom.Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra's 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.

"Debates on the future of the African continent and the role of gender identities in these visions are increasingly present in literary criticism forums as African writers become bolder in exploring the challenges they face and celebrating gender diversity in the writing of short stories, novels, poetry, plays and films. Controversies over the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer (LGBTIQ) communities in Africa, as elsewhere, continue in the context of criminalization and/or intimidation of these groups. Residual colonial moralizing and contemporary western identity norms and politics vie with longstanding polyvalent indigenous sexual expression. In addition to traditional media, the new social media have gained importance, both as sources of information exchange and as sites of virtual construction of gender identities. As with many such contentious issues, the variety of responses to the "state of the question" is strikingly visible across the continent. In this issue of ALT, guest editor John Hawley has sampled the ongoing conversations, in both African writing and in the analysis of contemporary African cinema, to show how queer studies can break with old concepts and theories and point the way to new gender perspectives on literary and cinematic output. This volume also includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles and a Literary Supplement."--Publisher's description

The writer frames his analysis of Kan Lume and Loo Zihan's feature length film Solos (2007) with a historical overview of the representation of queer sexualities in new Singaporean cinema. This approach also takes in the Penal Code Section 377A, arguing that not only do these repressive laws force queer sexualities to the margins of culture and society, but also that the State's censorship laws are a means by which it can reify ‘the Asian value system's supposed rejection of queerness’.

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’.

This study is an attempt to examine the ways in which popular culture can restructure the relationship between sexuality and power, through the case of Seoul Queer Films and Videos Festival, a cultural arena of newly emerged queer discourses in Korean society. In the past 10 years, queer discourses in Korea have undergone a rapid change. With heterosexual normativity being challenged and ‘queer’ being consumed as a cultural code, Korean spectators come to engage with a queer film festival in multilateral and sometimes contradictory contexts. This study will try to pose a controversial question to the heterosexual society by reading the complex interactions between film festivals, films and spectators while paying attention to the experiences of the participants in the Seoul Queer Films and Videos Festival and pointing at the political implications of queer films now in 2006. Through this, I try to look for possibilities of a queer cultural movement which rejects being co‐opted by the heterosexual society, constructs new ideas of social powers in relation with sexuality, and seeks alternative visions for such change in relations.

Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt’s Queer Cinema in the World initially proposes a radical comparative vision of cinema’s queer globalism. It aims to explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making.

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.

In 1971, I made a film entitled Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer in which I explore the objectifying ‘male’ gaze on my body in contrast to the subjective lived experience of my body. The film was a radical challenge to the gaze that objectifies woman – and thus imprisons her – which had hitherto dominated narrative cinema. Since the objectification of women has largely excluded us from the privileged phallogocentric discourses, in this paper I hope to bring into the psychoanalytic dialogue a woman's lived experience. I will approach this by exploring how remembering this film has become a personally transformative experience as I look back on it through the lens of postmodern and feminist discourses that have emerged since it was made. In addition, I will explore how this process of imaginatively looking back on an artistic creation to generate new discourses in the present is similar to the transformative process of analysis. Lastly, I will present a clinical example, where my embodied countertransference response to a patient's subjection to the objectifying male gaze opens space for a new discourse about her body to emerge.

A non-foundationalist construct for the Feiticeiro/a character that assumes neither an essentialist nature nor a determinist set of activities is possible. This does not prescribe a ‘type’ of ‘pervert’ character, but instead delineates an epistemic framing for a Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an etymologically based semiotic approach to character construction that accounts for a Derridean view that language is constituted by binary reciprocal delimitations and for a view of sex as a dereified expression of materialised instances of engagement by sexual subjects, in terms of which sexuality is rendered as an opened-outward and connected function. The chapter further deals with an approach based in an empathic engagement between audiences and Feiticeiro/a characters, which is apposite for audiences identifying with but not necessarily liking characters. The chapter closes the volume’s argument around how transgressive, sexually focused Feiticeiro/a characters might productively be constructed in terms other than of essences and determinist actions, but in terms of ‘meaning’ found in the points of connection between heterogeneous bodily surfaces.

Conservative discourses remain powerful in contemporary life. These demonise the notion of sexual transgressiveness without helping to give a clear, value neutral definition of what ‘transgressive’ is. Screenwriters attempting to write it into characters are therefore likely to rely on psychiatric epistemologies for sexual ‘perversion’ as framings for subjectivity. Unfortunately, Freudian epistemologies of ‘perversion’ render the psychical subject as invisible through built-in determining comparative reference to heteropatriarchal norms and through distinctions between ‘non-pathological’ and ‘pathological’ definitions. This chapter explores the Freudian constructs that entrench this, together with post-structuralist foundations that might revise the constitution and role of the individual subject (and therefore of filmic characters as facsimiles of real people) as he/she relates to the material world as a physical entity, and as he/she manipulates the discourses to which he/she is subject.

A post-humanist lens is useful as a starting-point to remedy the absenting and invisibilising effects of sexological epistemologies for the purposes of conceiving a constitution of ‘pervert’ filmic characters, since certain strains of existential thinking have a meta-theoretical pliancy that is useful for reflecting the non-binary character of complex people beyond simple identity categories, across a range of types and styles of filmic products. If matched with a semiological approach such as that espoused by Barthes, it thereby becomes possible to manipulate signs in the form of character constructions to represent people as more than the sum of their parts and to contain deeper significations that are built into the fabric of their construction. This requires a deeper understanding of the semiotic notion of ‘semes’ as the foundation for character construction. To this end, this chapter explores how sexual ‘perversion’ as reflected in notion of the ‘feitiço’ might serve as a foundation for a new episteme for ‘perverse’ characters, as the Feiticeiro/a as ‘sorcerer/sorceress’.

The notion of ‘perversity’ suggests inherent transgressiveness. However, a focus on practices does not help identify who filmic characters are in ways that might inform a paradigm for character identity suitable for translation into a visual medium. Failing to achieve this clarity, ‘perverts’ often end up as ‘ambulatory objects’ at once imagined and defined by what is not present. This chapter engages how this manifests in the nineteenth-century sexological discourses that reflected perverse prurience in terms of assumptions that all entities might be empirically identifiable in the same way that material phenomena can be perceived by means of the senses, which is especially visible in the various incarnations of Freudian constructs of ‘fetishism’ that refuse personal agency through reliance on a range of psychodynamic constructs.

If character actions are not to be seen in deterministic ways, then an alternative framing should be considered on which writers might base constructs of complexity of action. This is possible if action itself is seen as an expression of relationality rather than as activity-as-substance. Looking at people in this way enables the behaviour of Feiticeiro/a characters to be seen as activities that are more than the actions of combinations of sexed bodies in physical spaces. This chapter explores a construct for action on this basis as it becomes possible by acknowledging in a construct of ‘doing’ the phenomenological notions of ‘being’ as a Feiticeiro/a form constituted by a hybrid of ‘object-discourse-nature-society’ characterised by networks of confluence. The chapter explores the notion of the Feiticeiro/a character in terms of an internal coherency, taking account of interactions and activities (as exhibited through their material form), ‘naturalness’, linearity of course of action and embodied notions of meaning-creation.