Post-Queer Desires
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Post-Queer Desires: A Contemporary Queer Discourse in Pink Flamingos MA Thesis Media Studies: Film Studies Department of Humanities Author: Sidney Adelaar Supervisor: Abe Geil June 26, 2017 Word count: 13566 1 2 Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………. p. 5 1. The Anti-Social Queer Desiring-Machine: Going Beyond Queer………... p. 11 1.1 Antisocial Filth……………………………………………………………... p. 12 1.2 The Queer Desiring-Machine…………………………………………… p. 15 1.3 Desiring...Poop?…………………………………………………………... p. 19 2. Celebrating a Post-Queer Utopia or Dystopia?……………………………… p. 24 2.1 A Mudgey Dystopia……………………………………………………… p. 24 2.2 A Divine Utopia……………………………………………………………. p. 27 2.3 A Happy Post-Queer Birthday, Divine!………………………………... p. 30 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………… p. 37 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………….. p. 40 Appendix……………………………………………………………………………….. p. 41 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………. p. 44 Films Cited……………………………………………………………………………… p. 45 3 4 Introduction Queer cinema is a fairly recent category in cinema history. Starting around 30 years ago, during the same time in the 1980’s that queer theory became a prominent academic discipline, queer cinema seems to encompass all films that deal with gay and lesbian themes, or ‘LGBT’ to use a recent term. As these themes focus mainly on the sexuality of the characters and their struggles in a ‘straight’ world because of it, there appears to be a major centring around desires, be it sexual or something else. If a desire is not desirable in heteronormative society, ‘queer’ is the right word for it. This thesis’ main focus is this notion of queer desires. By focusing on this aspect of the queer, I will show just how these desires can shape queer cinema and provide a unique framework for the analysis of the modern queer film. Before I can get further into the material that will be used throughout the thesis however, a clear definition of ‘queer’ needs to be provided. Not just to understand the category of queer cinema, but also to be able to get a good grip on the desires that will be identified. Following Aaron’s introduction to her New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (2004), the most basic function of queer can be posed as: “an umbrella term or catch-all for uniting various forms of non-straight sexual identity” (5). However, queer is not just this umbrella ‘dictionary’ term, as it also encompasses all forms of resistance to norms of gender and sexuality, extending in turn towards the “non-fixity of gender expression and the non-fixity of both straight and gay sexuality”. In addition, further extending the term, ‘queer’ can be used to describe something that is non-conformative, a theoretical oppositional stance, taking a position that is not associated with gender and sexuality any more. For example in Blue, the refusal of a clear visual image can be seen as queer in the realm of cinema, refusing to conform to the regular cinematic conventions. Queer was used as a derogatory term before being appropriated by activists in the 1980’s. This way it “represented a re-appropriation of the power of the antagonistic, homophobic society, through reclaiming the term of abuse but also through a new approach to ‘gay’ politics: a taking on of the institution, rather 5 than a fearful, assimilated, complicity” (6). After this appropriation it provided an attractive self-label for oppositional politics, as it acknowledges these marginalized groups who in turn came to identify themselves as ‘queer’. So what we have here is a term which is elusive, without a clear definition, but what is clear is the fact that it is overall oppositional and non-conformative to the dominant structures in society, be that heteronormativity or simply formal conventions. As this thesis is mostly about queer desires, I am able to define them as non-comformative desires; desires that do not fit in the dominant heteronormative structured society. In the early 1990’s a wave of queer films took over the festival circuit, films directed by queer film makers with queer themes, including Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991), Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990). B. Ruby Rich was the one journalist who noticed a shared attitude and dubbed it New Queer Cinema. New Queer Cinema, as described by Rich in her famous 1992 Screen article (reprint: Aaron, 2004), is not so much a wave, more a movement. Rich describes this as a trend in the film festival circuit of Sundance, Toronto and Amsterdam in 1991 and 1992 and identifies it by a certain attitude that the films possess, rather than categorizing them by a particular aesthetic: she dubs this attitude or style as “‘Homo Pomo’: there are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind” (16). Still, Rich is very vague and indecisive whatever this ‘Homo Pomo’ exactly entails. We need to keep in mind that she had written this as a journalist, not as an academic, so naturally there is no precise analysis going on here. The article was nevertheless picked up by other, actual academics, and they in turn tried to be bring a form of definition into the New Queer Cinema frame. Michelle Aaron provides in her critical reader among an introduction and the original reprinted article by Rich, several other essays by a number of these scholars who each add their own thoughts and more precise definitions to the New Queer Cinema spectrum. A part that most academics can agree upon is the involvement of the 1980’s AIDS crisis in the dawn of New Queer Cinema. The degree of involvement and influence differs however. Where Arroyo (1993) asserts that AIDS gave rise to an epistemic shift in gay culture and caused the trend, Pearl argues that “New 6 Queer Cinema is AIDS cinema: not only because the films, as I will argue, emerge out of the time of and the preoccupations with AIDS, but because their narratives and also their formal discontinuities and disruptions, are AIDS-related” (23). As an example of AIDS creating the formal incoherences and disturbances she turns among other films to Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993), which disrupts visual and narrative expectations of the audience by refusing to show a conventional narrative on screen. There is no variation in the image, as all one will see is a blue screen. Going blind from an AIDS-related infection, cytomegalovirus, Jarman turned the image into AIDS itself to let the audience experience the virus in a direct matter, by taking away sight. Blue is not just a film about AIDS, it is AIDS. Pearl’s argument that AIDS is the embodiment of NQC is perhaps too absolute or deterministic to justify, but we can agree that the AIDS crisis was the spark that ignited the trend. I will come back later to this aspect in the introduction. As stated, the definition of queer is arbitrary. After all, the nature of the word itself is that it has no true meaning. What is queer and what is not queer is thus a very prominent question in the academic work about queer cinema. Nick Davis takes this to a next level in the sense that he takes a classical cinema philosopher, ‘queers’ his theories, and in turn adds films that are not typically seen as queer films to the New Queer Cinema wave. In his book The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema (2013) he extends the two cinema images as theorized by Deleuze with the next phase in cinema history, more specifically queer cinema history: the desiring-image. A combination of the Deleuzo/Guattarian concept of the desiring-machine and the two cinema books, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989), Davis recognises a new aesthetic in the New Queer Cinema movement and Homo-Pomo style and uses this classical theorist’s work in tandem with queer theory to construct “new frameworks for understanding what is “queer” about recent queer cinema, including films rarely classified this way” (3). And indeed, a major part of his book are films by David Cronenberg, a film maker who’s films are rarely seen as queer. Davis sees queer desire in his films Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991), and posits them in the same category of queer cinema as New Queer Cinema classics like Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991). 7 In any case, Davis argues that the Homo-Pomo aesthetics of this (queer) cinema historical era was a necessity and inevitability after the AIDS crisis. He parallels this argument from the categorization of Deleuze’s cinema books. In his Cinema books Deleuze describes that the transference from the period of the movement-image, cinema focusing on reproducing movement, to the time- image, cinema with the intent of going outside the classical narrative-time, was instigated by the Second World War (C1, 1). The propaganda machine of the Nazi-regime became such a powerful movement-image, that there was a necessity to make the audience restart their cognitive processes and regain their ability for critical thinking, and thus the time-image was born. No more mindless reproduction of movements, but cinema that forces you to think. So very much in the same way that the Nazi propaganda ‘created’ the time-image, Davis articulates the AIDS crisis as the inciter for the desiring-image (Davis, 9). The articulation and depiction of queer desires was needed to face and process the horrors that AIDS wrought among the queer population. It is in this wake of an epidemic that Davis poses the New Queer Cinema and modern queer cinema. Here is where my interest comes in when it comes to this periodization, as there is one American film maker who’s early work parallels many aspects of Davis’ post-AIDS Deleuzian desiring-image: John Waters.