Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in Documentary

 Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016) 

published in The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, Issue 01 ‘Transitory Parerga: Access and Inclusion in Contemporary Art,’ edited by Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds): pp. 245-263. [open access link]

Cüneyt Çakırlar's study critically analyzes the themes of queer migrancy and homecoming in two recent documentaries. Parvez Sharma’s A Sinner in Mecca (2015) documents the filmmaker’s journey from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia for his hajj pilgrimage. Using an essayistic, first-person documentary register, Sharma constructs a tension around his attachments to nation, religion, and sexuality. While the film offers a critique of religion as a punitive state apparatus, Sharma’s pronounced proprietorial relation to a migrant gay Muslim identity functions in progressive counter-valence. Tomer and Barak Heymann’s portrait documentary, Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016), tells the story of Saar, an Israeli gay man who was expelled from his Jewish community in Israel and has emigrated to London. Treating Saar’s HIV diagnosis as the marker of an affective crisis, the film oscillates between two distinct spaces of domesticity: Saar’s family in Israel, and his circle of friends in the U.K. In both films, the conflict between religion, national belonging, and sexual identity is resolved through a normative pull towards home and its affective restructuring of intimacy in the context of queer migrancy. The ameliorative status of homecoming operates as a default resolution in these films. A longing for home is that which both films register as the constitutive attachment of the queer migrant.

 

Keywords: affect, essay film, first-person, intersectionality, LGBTQ documentary, migration, religion, sexuality, transnationalism

To access the open-access journal, visit https://thegaragejournal.org/en/

The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture is an independent interdisciplinary academic platform that advances critical discussions about contemporary art, culture, and museum practice in the Russian and global contexts. It publishes original empirical, theoretical, and speculative research in a variety of genres, celebrating innovative ways of presentation. Fully peer-reviewed, The Garage Journal provides an open-access source book of ideas for an international audience.

 

The Care Manifesto (The Care Collective)

Wednesday 25^th November 3-4pm (via zoom)

For joining details, contact Martin O'Shaughnessy (martin.oshaughnessy@ntu.ac.uk ) 

 

ALL WELCOME!

 

In this talk The Care Collective discuss their recently published book The Care Manifesto (Verso 2020): 

"We lay out a radical vision for a truly caring world, demanding that we put care at the very heart of our lives and our politics. In the wake of COVID-19, the need to acknowledge our mutual interdependence and vulnerabilities is more urgent than ever. Care must be valued and shared, no longer tolerated as an exploited form of labour, shouldered mainly by women and the poor. Rejecting the extensive carelessness so evident today, we lay out our model of ‘universal care’, which calls for inventive forms of collective care at every scale of life. We propose expanding kinships through 'promiscuous care' and building communities strengthened by co-operative and public ownership. We show how genuine care involves reinvigorating welfare states, creating alternatives to capitalist markets and caring across borders. The Manifesto, in short, imagines a world in which care is everywhere—from our most intimate connections to our relationship with the planet itself."

 

The Care Collective 

Andreas Chatzidakis is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Ethics at the School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway University of London. His works include the Consuming Modern Slavery report (2018) and Ethics and Morality in Consumption(2016) 

 

Dr Jamie Hakim worked at Attitude magazine from 2003 and is now Lecturer in Media Studies at UEA. He is Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project 'Digital Intimacies’, partnered with the Terrance Higgins Trust, and author of Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture (2019) 

 

Jo Littler is a Professor in the Sociology Department and is Director of the Gender and Sexualities Research Centre at City, University of London, UK.  Her books include Against Meritocracy (2018) Radical Consumption?  (2008) and with Roshi Naidoo The Politics of Heritage: The legacies of ‘race’' (2005).  

 

Dr Catherine Rottenberg is Associate Professor in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her books include The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (2018), Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side (2014), and Performing Americanness(2008). 

 

Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology & Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her many books include Beyond the Fragments (1980) What is to be done about the family?(1983) Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politics (1999) Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (2007) Straight Sex(1994) Making Trouble (2007) and Out of Time (2013).

 

11/11/2020 3-4, as part of our ongoing research seminar series, the Centre is very pleased to welcome Su Ansell to talk about her experimental film, Breast'work. 

As she explains:

 

"My experimental films and installations explore female experience through layered poetic connections. The intention, through exhibition and accompanying writings is to generate dialogue and debate about the issues and feelings raised by the work, and thereby to contribute to a counter-cultural narrative concerning the representation of women. There is a strong personal element to the pieces, the aim of which is to provide a stimulus for collective memory. By deconstructing the familiar, the work encourages the spectator to consider other perspectives, and also their relationship to the creation they are viewing. I hope thereby to engage new audiences with film as art. The work and my reflections on it, contribute to the expression of an alternative, rich, complex and powerful visual history of female existence."

 

The talk will be of interest to feminist and gender studies scholars and creatives alike!

The first online meeting of the Inequality, Culture and Difference research centre, will be held on Wed 28/10/2020 13:00 - 14:00 where we will be joined by our very own Jamie Williams and David Wright, talking about their fascinating research on the UK governments' daily communications with the British public during the coronavirus pandemic.

 

ABSTRACT BELOW:

 

Pronominal ambiguity and ascriptions of responsibility in the UK daily coronavirus briefings

Jamie Williams

David Wright

Nottingham Trent University

Within political discourse, pronouns have been highlighted as important linguistic features due to their inherent ambiguity, and their roles in creating distance or closeness and accepting or denying responsibility for actions (Fetzer and Bull, 2008; Mulderrig, 2012). These issues are pertinent to the COVID-19 pandemic, as governments attempt to clearly communicate guidance to the general public, as well as describe steps being taken to slow the virus’ spread. Within the context of the United Kingdom, one of the worst affected countries globally, we investigated how pronouns were used by governmental speakers to administer responsibility and whether they contributed to reported criticisms of ambiguity in the government’s communications (Oliver, 2020).

A corpus of 92 political speeches, totalling 117,779 words, was constructed based upon official transcripts from the UK government’s website. Focussing on the use of the first person plural (1PL) pronouns, 3,045 concordance lines were analysed to identify (1) their referent – particularly if they carried an exclusive (we – the government) or inclusive (we – the country) reading, and (2) the transitivity patterns these pronouns act as Participants in (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014).

We argue that the UK government uses the inherent ambiguity between the exclusive and inclusive readings of this pronoun to mitigate their own portrayed responsibility for controlling the spread of the virus. We argue that they do so through at least two means. Firstly, when using 1PL pronouns in an exclusive manner, although they represent themselves overwhelmingly as Actors, they obscure the precise details about the measures they are taking. Secondly, when using the 1PL pronouns in an inclusive manner, they represent the British public as co-Actors in processes they have no control over and indeed are usually considered to responsibility of the government themselves.

 

Fetzer, A. and Bull, P. (2008) 'Well, I answer it by simply inviting you to look at the evidence': The strategic use of pronouns in political interviews. Journal of Language and Politics, 7(2): 271–289.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C.I.I.M. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar, 4^th Edition. London: Routledge.

Mulderrig, J. (2012) The hegemony of inclusion: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of deixis in education policy. Discourse and Society, 23(6): 701–728.

Oliver, D. (2020) Covid-19 highlights the need for effective government communications. BMJ, 369: m1863, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1863.