New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 10, Issue 2-3, 2012

In this article, I analyse how post-millennium queer cinema, even while no longer ‘new’, attempts to remember the old in order to articulate the new through what I call ‘queer hypothetical history’. I ground my arguments in relation to the film Shortbus (Mitchell, 2006), which, I suggest, returns to the pastness of the past in order to aesthetically represent a radically different ‘now’ – a new present that is informed by queer memory’s inventive and performative potential. My analysis of Shortbus analyses how the film troubles the binary between the material and the ‘immaterial’ to create queer cultural memory through a historical ‘what if’. While looking backward to the past to cull memories of what could have been, Shortbus also looks forward towards a queer futurity to imagine what could be. I thus analyse how hypothetical memories in the film serve as a queer index to hypothetical futures.

There are significant differences between the original John Waters version of Hairspray (1988) and Adam Shankman’s 2007 remake in terms of the films’ camp sensibility and representations of queerness. While the original reflects a subversive attitude towards heteronormativity that draws on the social upheavals of the 1960s (as reflected by its music and self-awareness), the remake offers a sanitized and reassuring representation of gender-bending through its composed (rather than compiled) score and casting choices. This article explores the significance of the camp musical as a political vehicle for queer politics. It provides a detailed comparison of the performances of Divine and John Travolta in the key role of Edna Turnblad in order to consider the ways by which queer representations are being recuperated for the entertainment and economic benefit of mainstream audiences.

The objective of this study is to contextualize Chinese lesbian cinema that emerged in the twenty-first century in mainland China. By situating lesbian films in the context of globalization, particularly within the framework of the debate on global gayness, it traces the trajectory of a new Chinese discourse of homosexuality, developed since the 1990s and articulated through the dynamic interaction and assimilation between predatory Euro-American and resistant local forces. Being both a part and a product of the hybrid homosexual discourse, lesbian cinema subsists in the space of Chinese independent/underground film, bearing all the major characteristics of the marginalized subgenre. The article concludes with critical analysis of two films, Jinnian xiatian/Fish and Elephant (Li Yu) in 2001 and Lalala/Lost In You (Zhu Yiye) in 2006, to showcase how female same-sex love and relationships are defined and represented in Chinese lesbian cinema.

This article explores two transnational films about South Asians, Bend It Like Beckham (Chadha, 2002) and Chutney Popcorn (Ganatra, 1999), with regard to their production of spaces within the home, of family and diaspora, in relation to counter-hegemonic non-heterosexual or non-heteronormative female subjects. Both films treat the space of the home and the traditions it embodies as culturally valuable and therefore not to be forfeited by the female protagonist; however, at the same time, these spaces bring with them the architecture of the hegemonic and the heteropatriarchal. Chutney Popcorn is able to reimagine traditions to accommodate the ‘family outlaw’ that is the lesbian through the labours of the literal figure of the reproductive woman, whereas Bend It Like Beckham contains the subversive challenges posed by feminine labours on the sporting field and at home to enshrine normative femininities squarely within the renegotiated diasporic home.

This article explores how a reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and the emergence of identitarian discourses have variously effectuated the representation of queer characters in Bombay cinema. It offers close analysis of film texts, both prior to as well as after the reading down of Article 377, in order to map a larger network of change towards a neo-liberal inclusion of the ‘gay’ citizen subject. A study of representation of queer characters in these films points towards how the ‘queer’ becomes a discursive category, open to appropriation, and also shows how earlier traditions/tropes of representation are either reworked or subverted to fit into a globalized discourse of identity.

Michael Burke’s The Mudge Boy (2003) is a film about an American farm boy, Duncan Mudge, who befriends a chicken following the death of his mother. The chicken, which is a source of comfort to him and ridicule to others, is a constant reminder of his late mother who, it transpires, taught him how to orally ‘becalm’ chickens. This unsettling relationship is offset by an equally disturbing sadomasochistic relationship that Duncan develops with a similarly aged male neighbour, Perry Foley. Distinguishing between gay, queer and post-queer, this article suggests that The Mudge Boy provides a new template for queer cinema and, in fact, queer theory in the twenty-first century.

This article provides a genealogy of a recent wave of cinematic pornography and situates ‘queer porn’ at the nexus of subversive art practice, hardcore pornography and sexual and body politics. The analysis is rooted in a close reading of Courtney Trouble’s film Nostalgia (2009), contextualized within the discourses of porn studies (an area of academic focus in film studies and visual cultural studies), feminism and queer theory. The four ultimate claims are that queer porn is characterized by (1) citationality (i.e., playful references to previous porn films); (2) multiplicity and variety of bodies and genders (trans, genderqueer, modified, fat bodies); (3) perverse and alternative pleasures (e.g., female ejaculation); and (4) queer audience address and community formation.