Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2019

The fantasy of the west as a land of 'dreams come true' is a long tradition in the Eastern European cultural imagination and in cinema as well. Eastern European queer-themed films imagine the west as a utopian dreamland and depict the East (Eastern Europe) as backward and futureless. By analysing relevant Eastern European queer-themed films from three different decades, this article points out how the inherited fantasy of the west as imagined during the state socialist era infiltrates Eastern Europe's self-perception, when – in an act of self-colonization – the films create a hierarchy of values within which the liberal west is contrasted with the depiction of Eastern European spaces through othering strategies central in western thought. When the characters' dreams do come true – and they reach the west – disappointment is inevitable. Their retreat to their Eastern origins results in double disappointment, being trapped between crushed western dreams and Eastern nightmares.

In recent years, the reputation of the so-called 'White City' Tel Aviv as one of the global gay capitals has been disseminated and upheld by mainstream media. This article builds upon existing analyses of Israel's supposed liberalness towards non-normative lifestyles and its strong links to the phenomenon of pinkwashing. The term has come to signify the glossing over of Israeli settler colonial occupation that specifically directs attention to Israel's progressive LGBTQ rights by juxtaposition with a narrative of queer oppression among Palestinian communities. Looking at a range of media representations, such as Jake Witzenfeld's 2015 documentary Oriented and the mediatized phenomena of Tel Aviv Pride and LGBTQ-friendly Birthright Trips, I explore how these narratives ultimately contribute towards shaping Tel Aviv as an exclusionary urban space, inaccessible to those subjects who do not comply or fit with a securitized and corporatized new normal. By using a critical approach to the city's founding discourse, and the more recent Israeli state's ethno-nationalist investments towards branding Tel Aviv as a queer city, I argue that non-(homo)normative members of the LGBTQ community, and especially Palestinians, are silenced and pushed further away from what is constructed as the queer subject in the 'White City' space.

In this article, I analyse Ferzan Ozpetek's representation of queer narratives within the changing Italian culture and analyse his fusion of accented and cosmopolitan film aesthetics to narrate the hybrid queer and non-queer identities that his characters embody in three of his films: Le fate ignorant (His Secret Life) (2001), Saturno Contro (Saturn in Opposition) (2007) and Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons) (2010). Due to their multicultural nature, Ozpetek's films often represent in-between and multifaceted characters and exemplify culturally complex dynamic storytelling. I mainly focus on the representation of queer and immigrant identities, displacement and replacement, notions of home and the idea of family.

The transnational circulation of Euro-American queer discourse affects queer subjectivity in local contexts. Through a case study of the Rainbow Love wedding competition, this article unravels the interplay between transnational queer politics, queer affect and the economy of visibility in the emerging pink market to explore how they shape the queer landscape in mainland China. Rainbow Love demonstrates how recent queer visibility in Chinese media manifests as a narrative commodity that is embedded in consumerism and in colonialist sexual discourse. By exploiting post-Cold War anxiety in mainland China, Rainbow Love invites affective identification and produces an 'ideal' queer subjectivity in the Chinese pink market: cosmopolitan, mobile and middle-class queers who desire and can afford luxury consumption. We argue that such queer visibility in the Chinese pink market has become a regulatory force on Chinese queer subjects despite the liberatory narratives that are advocated in the mass media.

Brazil has one of the highest rates of violence against trans people in the world. It is in this context of dehumanization that the work of self-identified Black travesti artist Linn da Quebrada emerges. In this article, I analyse Linn da Quebrada's performances in three of the artist's official music videos, all released in 2016: 'Talento', 'Enviadescer' and 'Bixa Preta'. After briefly introducing the ideas of embodied translation and disidentifications, I analyse Linn da Quebrada's survival strategies in terms of simultaneous rejection of cis-masculinity and the embracing of queer femininity, resulting in a bicha travesti worldmaking; a world in which travestis of colour are fully human. Ultimately, Linn da Quebrada's disidentificatory performances concomitantly suggest a mode of survival and a vehicle for structural change, both of which deserve close consideration from scholars interested in queer transnational contexts.

This article examines how the Netflix series Sense8 uses multiracial, transnational characters and relationships as a form of transgression over restrictive racial and sexual categories and their subsequent oppression. In Sense8, the characters' erotic desires for the other are represented as the entry into a deracialized, dehistoricized, depoliticized and liberal global public sphere. Sexual pleasure with the colonized, racialized and gendered other is represented as a form of transgressing and transcending the limitations of the body that non-western and non-white bodies perpetually remain trapped in. These representations are also normalizing tropes of queer utopias that do not acknowledge the intersectional erasures that continuously occur in this series. As transnational scholars from Ghana, India and China, who are situated in daily inter-racial relations, we challenge the simplistic and uncritical viewing of Sense8 through our hybrid postcolonial subjectivities.