Queer Cinema (original) (raw)
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Gay men in the Spanish film comedies of the Transition to democracy
Journal of Homosexuality, 2013
This article studies the representation of gay men in Spanish comedies of the 1970s. It analyzes how cinema used the stereotypical image of gay men projected by the dictatorship and how, once it ended, this image endured in the comedy genre. It introduces film theories on the construction of humor taken from relevant authors, such as Jordan, Charney, Voitylla, and Petri. Afterward, it focuses on the works of Ozores as a filmmaker who encapsulates the main characteristics of the so-called comedia de mariquitas (sissy comedy). It analyzes how the construction of humor was based on the Francoist conception of gay men, and questions why the figure of the gay man was so effective in the production of comedy. Finally, this article refers to Dyer's theories around stereotyping, and develops them to study the Spanish context.
"Outing Javier Fuentes-León's Contracorriente and the case for a New Queer Cinema in Latin America."
The piece proposes a reevaluation of contemporary Queer Latin American cinema through the study of Javier Fuentes-León's Contracorriente. I maintain a transdisciplinary approach to the analysis by interrelating criticism on Queer Latin America with broader critical categorizations such as New Queer Cinema, to thereby properly contextualize the film within local and global paradigms. The second purpose of these pages, albeit tangential to the first, is to explore the affective and aesthetic qualities of Fuentes-León's film, as I suggest that Contracorriente is more problematic than a feel-good film about homosexual awareness, and is, instead, a paradoxical project that underlines the tensions of gender, spatial, aesthetic, and political difference within heteronormative systems. I examine the affect of homosexuality through the identification of an aesthetics of heteronormativity that conditions a non-Queer reading and feeling of the film. The study, furthermore, examines the use of space in the film, and interrelates it with contemporary works by Lucía Puenzo and Julia Solomonoff, as I argue that Fuentes-León outs the homosexual from traditional topologic referents.
This paper analyzes how homosexuality was portrayed in Spanish cinema and television during the Franco dictatorship. Our findings show that three main strategies were used in order to elude the censor: concealing (using implicit references), caricature (exaggerating stereotypes) and appropriation (a priori re-reading of non-homosexual discourses). We also study how contemporary cinema and television portrays homosexuality as it was during Francoism, with trends such as the recovery of historical homosexual characters, a harsh reflection of the prevailing repression, and a defusing of the issue with the generation of discourses closer to contemporary rather than historical sensibility.
Latin American Perspectives, 2020
Using film semiotics, queer studies, and discourse theory as developed by Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek, an enunciative and rhetorical analysis of Rosa Patria (Pink Motherland) (Santiago Loza, 2008–2009) and Putos peronistas, cumbia del sentimiento (Peronist Faggots, Cumbia Feeling) (Rodolfo Cesatti, 2011) points to the changes in the political and cinematic frames that have enabled the transformation of LGBT people into political subjects in the context of the Argentine documentary of the twenty-first century. The metaenunciative and metadiegetic marks made evident by reframing processes in audiovisual texts can be read as a discursive transition from “element” to “moment” and as cinematic-reflexive symbolization of the traumatic event posed by the dislocation or antagonism that institutes these identities in situated local contexts, contexts contemporary with the struggles for diverse sexual citizenship that led to the promulgation of Argentina’s Equal Marriage (2010) and Gender Ident...
Letter From Mexico: The Queer Mainstream [in current Mexican cinema]
Film Quarterly, 2016
This article treats three recent feature films on LGBT themes in Mexico which, rejecting previous arthouse styles, can be read as broadly mainstream in their style and audience address. They are Cuatro lunas, Todo el mundo tiene a alguien menos yo, and Carmín tropical. The article also address more broadly Mexican queer film, including such producers as Mecos, a porn brand.
Transnational Cinemas 4.2 2013
Through a focus on La niña santa/The Holy Girl by Lucrecia and XXY by Lucía Puenzo , this article aims to examine the relationship between texts, sex and money. It considers theoretical approaches to European funding programmes and world cinema, and argues that a number of European production companies have created spaces for queer cinema which has proven beneficial to a range of Latin American films and has coincided with a boom in films directed by women. The article focuses on two new powerful protagonists, Amalia, Martel"s holy girl and Puenzo"s Alex, an intersex teenager, who both bring new gazes and new forms of representation to global screens. My concern in the study are the ways in which certain film languages can be used to address an implied international art cinema spectator to make queerness part of our filmic conversation with texts, and the ways in which these languages engage with new modernities emerging through the reconfigurations of new queer families.
Journal of Aging Studies, 2022
If (older) gay men have recurrently been stereotyped as hypersexual and as sexually voracious, they have also been represented as weak and effeminate, miserable and lonely, and as less manly than their heterosexual counterparts (Goltz, 2014; Freeman, 2010). Quite often, as Goltz reminds us, the two stereotypes intersect, as in classic films such as Death in Venice, Gods and Monsters, or Love and Death on Long Island, to name but a few, where ageism and homophobia combine to judge intergenerational relations as inappropriate and gay characters as "dirty old men" eager to recover their lost youth. Given these negative images, it is no wonder, then, that both youthism and ableism have become part and parcel of contemporary gay culture, which may also be linked to the few positive cultural images available of aging or disabled gay male bodies (Goltz, 2014). Starting off from the assumption that bodies are shaped and reshaped in complex interactions between physical and symbolic dimensions, the paper will demonstrate, however, how (auto)biographical narratives of older gay men, what we call "egodocuments," may be useful to rethink such traditional (mis)conceptions. Crossing the traditional divide between the Social Sciences and the Humanities, the study will draw on both life stories and film representations of older gay men in Spain, focusing on Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's (2019) latest film, Pain and Glory, as a (semi-)autobiographical revision of traditional representations of gay men's aging. While Almodovar's protagonist and alter-ego, Salvador Mallo, appears as "prematurely aged" (Curtis and Thompson, 2015) due to bodily pain and disability, the film also travels back and forth from Mallos's childhood and youth to his maturity. This shows aging not only as a life-course experience, but also helps redefine it as a "queer" rather than linear or "straight" experience (Halberstam), allowing for both "pain and glory" to coexist in old age. Almodóvar's portraiture of gay aging will be compared to the life stories collected in a number of focus groups with Spanish older gay men, which will provide equally complex, varied, and often contradictory narratives.
Sexploitation, Space, and Lesbian Representation in Armando Bo s Fuego
Latin American Cinemas: Local Views and Transnational Connections. University of Calgary Press., 2011
While recently more and more literature addressing lesbian issues in Latin America has appeared in sociology and literary criticism, in the area of film this is a rather new territory. This essay, therefore, seeks to explore such "territory" by establishing a much needed connection between representation, sexploitation, and spatio-temporal relations. My analysis of the Argentine film Fuego (Fire, Armando Bo, 1968), will show the correlation between the cultural and the socioeconomic by linking sexploitation to the social and mental spatio-temporal structures that help in the construction of the lesbian subject’s representation and identity.