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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.

The queer women's comedic web series that have flourished in the last decade, serving as launching pads for their creators, coincided with media-industry nichification's segmentation of a consumer population regarded by advertisers and content providers as one monolithic LGBTQ community. The series I examine-from The Slope, which premiered in 2010, to Strangers, released in 2017-voice their creators' and characters' marginalization from and even opposition to such an imagined community, through recourse to what I call a "bad queer" rhetorical practice, which uses ironic metacommentary to critique assimilationist values and tropes alongside queer identity policing. These series emerged, at least initially, as an alternative sphere of queer media production and a queer discursive mode that employs disidentification as a politicized strategy to challenge dominant LGBTQ scripts. Offering an irreverent alternative to mainstream and millennial LGBTQ cultural products, these "bad queer" web series express the plurality of the queer "community" and expose political contestations within its ranks, and in so doing serve as brand differentiation for a new generation of queer media producers.

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.

"African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness uses critical race theory to discuss American films that embrace contemporary issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender. Its linear history chronicles black-oriented narrative film from post-World War II through the presidential administration of Barack Obama. Editor Mark A. Reid has assembled a stellar list of contributors who approach their film analyses as an intersectional practice that combines queer theory, feminism/womanism, and class analytical strategies alongside conventional film history and theory. Taken together, the essays invigorate a "Black Lives Consciousness," which speaks to the value of black bodies that might be traumatized and those bodies that are coming into being-ness through intersectional theoretical analysis and everyday activism. The volume includes essays such as Gerald R. Butters's, "Blaxploitation Film," which charts the genre and its uses of violence, sex, and misogyny to provoke a realization of other philosophical and sociopolitical themes that concern intersectional praxis. Dan Flory's "African-American Film Noir" explains the intertextual-fictional and socio-ecological-dynamics of black action films. Melba J. Boyd's essay, "'Who's that Nigga on that Nag?': Django Unchained and the Return of the Blaxploitation Hero," argues that the film provides cultural and historical insight, "signifies" on blackface stereotypes, and chastises Hollywood cinema's misrepresentation of slavery. African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness embraces varied social experiences within a cinematic Black Lives Consciousness intersectionality. The interdisciplinary quality of the anthology makes it approachable to students and scholars of fields ranging from film to culture to African American studies alike."

"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

Around 1994 or 1995 I came across a call for articles for an anthology to be published by the XII Black International Cinema , documenting ten years of the festival and associated activities, 1986– 95. The request asked for articles and film lists from an international and intercultural group of scholars and filmmakers, and I thought this was an opportunity to document the exciting and pioneering work that was being done by a community of emerging Black lesbian and gay film-and video makers at the time.

In novel ways, and from a surprising location, Yvonne Welbon’s Remembering Wei-Yi Fang, Remembering Myself: An Autobiography (1995) explores some of the same dilemmas that earlier African American expatriate artists promulgated, using their time abroad as a win dow onto America, while relishing the nurturing possibilities of partial escape from American racism. Some of the most complex and insightful observations about America and American racism have been crafted by African American expatriate artists such as James Baldwin and Josephine Baker. These artists’ depictions of their encounters abroad complicate our understandings of American identity and American racism.

Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt attempt a formidable feat in Queer Cinema in the World: to take three charged yet indispensable concepts and theorize their interconnections. A tour-de-force analysis of the triangulation between “queer,” “cinema,” and “world”, this coauthored monograph largely succeeds in drawing out threads between crucial issues in cinema studies, queer theory, and global studies.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including where and how queerness is produced, the use of paratexts to expand and stop queer readings of films, and queers' non-reliance on mainstream media to produce queer stories.

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

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).

Most writing on transgender cinema focuses on representations of trans people, rather than works made by trans people. This article surveys the history of trans and gender variant people creating audiovisual media from the beginning of cinema through today. From the professional gender impersonators of the stage who crossed into film during the medium’s first decades to selfidentified transvestite and transsexual filmmakers, like Ed Wood and Christine Jorgensen of the mid-twentieth century, to the enormous upsurge in trans filmmaking of the 1990s, this article explores the rich and complex history of trans and gender variant filmmaking. It also considers the untraceable gender variant filmmakers who worked in film and television without their gender history becoming known and those who made home movies that have been lost to history.

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.

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.

In seeking to find a solid paradigm for the Feiticeiro/a character, it is tempting to approach the established psychiatric categories. Unfortunately, many of these suggest that people are ineffably different from others and that people will behave according to type in a predictable, even inevitable way. This chapter explores the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which merely re-inscribes essentialist and determinist tendencies by means of processes akin to the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence and linguistic fixity. The chapter explores further how this is embedded in the category of ‘fetishism’, ‘fetishistic transvestism’ and ‘transvestic fetishism’, which contain certain problematic vestigial tails of Freudian categories that make the psychiatric definitions of ‘fetishism’ unsuitable as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character.

The categories for ‘perversion’ in the World Health Organization’s ICD fail to describe people and their practices, thereby obscuring the remarkable singularity of individuals and diversity of groups. Instead, they prescribe heteronormative sexual behaviour, which is unhelpful as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an alternative epistemic construct, as becomes available in the notion of a focalising character, which reflects a ‘semic’ construct that negates the notion of a ‘pervert’ character as a substance, but instead embraces the notion of a Feiticeiro/a character as a structure. The chapter further explores the philosophical nature of this structure as it relates to the thematic elements of a narrative whilst engaging in believable activities in a material world. The chapter then suggests an approach to structure based in a phenomenological notion of the replacement of ‘substance’ with ‘form’/‘structure’ as the foundation of meaning.

An episteme for the Feiticeiro/a as a filmic character who is ‘perverse’ needs a form if it is to be useful to writers wanting to construct complex transgressive sexual characters. The beginnings of this framing are productively associated with the semiotic notion of ‘connotation’. This chapter explores what is meant by complexity in character construction and suggests a framing focused on character as an embodied being as a helpful starting-point for an episteme for characterological ‘perversion’. The chapter explores this as a non-foundationalist framing that transcends problematic Cartesian distinctions, concrete object materiality and woolly broad-stroke statements of a disembodied discursive constitution of social and personal experience.

If the Feiticeiro/a as a psychologically defined and complex character is to be seen as an embodied form/structure (not substance) that exists in dialectical relationships between self, other and discursive constructions of society, a clearer indication should be made about what kinds of behaviours or actions he/she should engage in. This chapter explores how psychiatric diagnostic criteria fail to provide assistance, despite professing to authoritatively mark stable, reliable and accurate epistemic boundaries to sexual activity. The chapter thereby addresses questions of the description of actions versus the demarcation of thoughts, objects, feelings and time as invisible and abstracted notions that are virtually the opposite of what is useful for an episteme for the Feiticeiro/a. It also approaches how the diagnostic criteria codify ‘perverse’ activity in determinist terms, thereby insidiously refusing an epistemic construct of action into which is built an acknowledgement of the behaviours of the Feiticeiro/a as a complex subjectivity.

Since Nell Shipman wrote and starred in Back to God's Country (1919), Canadian women have been making films. The accolades given to film-makers such as Patricia Rozema (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, When Night is Falling), Alanis Obomsawin (My Name Is Kahenttiiosta, Walker), and Micheline Lanctot (Deux Actrices) at festivals throughout the world in recent years attest to the growing international recognition for films made by Canadian women. With Gendering the Nation the editors have produced a definitive collection of essays, both original and previously published, that address the impact and influence of a century of women's film-making in Canada. In dialogue with new paradigms for understanding the relationship of cinema with nation and gender, Gendering the Nation seeks to situate women's cinema through the complex optic of national culture. This collection of critical essays employs a variety of frameworks to analyse cinematic practices that range from narrative to documentary to the avant garde.