Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction. Festivals, Uncut: Queering Film Festival Studies, Curating LGBTQ Film Festivals
- 1 Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies
- 2 The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals, and Queer Cinema's Legs
- 3 Out of the Celluloid Closet, into the Theatres! Towards a Genealogy of Queer Film Festivals and Gay and Lesbian Film Studies
- 4 Festivals as Archives: Collective Memory and LGBTQ Festivals’ Temporality
- 5 Images+Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Homoscapes
- Conclusion. The Impossibility of Festival Studies? On the Temporalities of Field Intervention and the Queering of Festival Studies
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- About the Author
- Index
5 - Images+Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Homoscapes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction. Festivals, Uncut: Queering Film Festival Studies, Curating LGBTQ Film Festivals
- 1 Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies
- 2 The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals, and Queer Cinema's Legs
- 3 Out of the Celluloid Closet, into the Theatres! Towards a Genealogy of Queer Film Festivals and Gay and Lesbian Film Studies
- 4 Festivals as Archives: Collective Memory and LGBTQ Festivals’ Temporality
- 5 Images+Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Homoscapes
- Conclusion. The Impossibility of Festival Studies? On the Temporalities of Field Intervention and the Queering of Festival Studies
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Chapter 5 focuses on the geopolitical imaginings embedded in festival programming. In screening films from various countries, festivals participate in the circulation of various discourses on the globalization of queerness. Borrowing from gay linguists’ focus on the interplay between geography and subjectivities, I pay attention to the language used to describe various films and contend that catalogues perform the task of cultural translation. They reinterpret films from a foreign context for a nationally situated audience. As institutions screening films from all around the world, they simultaneously localize films from other geographical contexts and accentuate geopolitical imaginings of queerness. As a method, festivals’ curatorial practices provide us with a model for reconceptualizing the globalization of sexuality.
Keywords: transnational; festivals; translation; globalization of sexuality; gay languages; queer worldlings
‘A window into the queer film world.’
‘the ethnoscape and the homoscape, their overlaps and convergences, cannot properly be understood without reference to their rootedness in the metropolitan and the national, dynamic places not only of hybridity and dislocatedness, but also of rootedness, coalition, and intervention.’
In the previous chapter, I argued that LGBTQ festivals presuppose and promote particular types of engagement with history and memory. As a juxtaposition or collage of historically situated representations, LGBTQ festivals illustrate some of the ways in which we access a visual history of queerness. Chapter 5 displaces this interrogation onto the geopolitical terrain: it seeks to reconcile festival studies’ emphasis on film traffic with the growing debates on the globalization of sexuality. In particular, scholars have argued that festivals constitute an ideal space for thinking about transnational cinemas. According to Iordanova:
Film festivals are inherently transnational in that no matter what the intention of the festival is […] the diverse content that is being showcased effectively undermines and counter-balances nationalist tendencies. […] There is no better place than a film festival to witness the transnational dynamics of cinema coming into full light.
While several scholars have described how the interplay between local and global at the heart of the festival phenomenon shapes film traffic, promotes a problematic tourist gaze, is intertwined with urban planning and city branding, or more generally conditions the ways we understand national cinemas, there is surprisingly little written on the relationship between sexual politics and the geopolitics of festival organizing and programming.
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- Information
- LGBTQ Film FestivalsCurating Queerness, pp. 185 - 232Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020