The Monogamous/Promiscuous Optics in Contemporary Gay Film

Cüneyt Çakırlar & Gary Needham (2020) The monogamous/promiscuous optics in contemporary gay film: registering the amorous couple in Weekend (2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016), New Review of Film and Television Studies, 18:4, 402-430

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2020.1800329

This article explores representations of same-sex intimacy in contemporary gay cinema by focusing on two films, Weekend (2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016). Both films spatialise intimacy, which is reflected in a formal appeal to monogamous and promiscuous optics. What interests us here is how the rela- tional politics of monogamy/promiscuity can be considered as stylistic and ideological registers in gay filmmaking. Informed by Leo Bersani’s work, we investigate how gay cinema tests the social viability/intelligibility of same-sex intimacy against a centring of the self. Furthermore, we explore how gay films use form and style to situate both their politics and their spectators through specta- cles of erotic relationality. Following Bersani, the article proposes a theory of cinematic optics that privilege the impersonal over the personal, and the onto- logical over the psychological. Weekend ‘ovalises’ intimacy and locates the couple formally and ideologically. The couple in Weekend’s space of sociality operates within a monogamous optic that presents intimacy through stabilising identities and psychologising subject positions. Théo & Hugo, however, reorients spectator- ship as impersonal and promiscuous in finding a way to express the experience of cruising and sociability in ways that are dispersed and extensible.

On the Gimp

Gary Needham has recently published an article on the gimp as an image of SM in popular culture very much in the spirit of Gayle Rubin’s work in seeking to understand why sex is so terrifying for mainstream culture. The article appears in Fashion Theory Vol.18 No.2. 

The article investigates the cultural power associated with the gimp and the gimp mask. The gimp is a clothed or costumed SM body, frequently a submissive that often wears a leather or rubber costume that covers and effectuates the entire body including the face. The gimp is also a representation of SM that circulates throughout fashion and film and other forms of popular culture. Since the gimp’s first public outing and naming in the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction it has become the byword for the head-to-toe leather SM look that has been appropriated by a number of designers as way of exploring and exploiting the relationship between fashion, fetishism, and transgression. As a counterpoint to the popular image of SM in fashion and popular film, the article also explores how the artists Catherine Opie and Robert Mapplethorpe have represented the gimp, not as an index of horror or transgressive style rather as an affirmative image of their own SM communities that, while still intended to shock and confront, is a defiant attempt to rescue or reclaim the gimp from its negative associations.

Here’s an extract from the article on Catherine Opie’s iconic work Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994):

[…] In contradistinction to Pulp Fiction and the gimp monsters of popular culture and the horror film, in the same year as Pulp Fiction photographer Catherine Opie produced a self-portrait of herself in a gimp mask called Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994). In the self-portrait Opie is sitting in front of chintzy brocade wallpaper, lettering freshly cut in to her bleeding skin which reads ‘pervert’, and she is pierced along each arm with forty-six evenly spaced temporary needles; at the time Opie belonged to the San Francisco SM community. Why would Opie make an image that is so difficult to look at? Why would anyone do that to their body? Why would a self-portrait deny access to the artist’s face? These are important questions the work provokes. In Self-Portrait/Pervert Opie recalls that she ‘wanted to push the whole realm of beauty and elegance, but also to make people scared out of their wits’ (Ferguson 2008: 106). Unlike the scare tactics of Pulp Fiction Opie’s intentions are altogether different. Self-Portrait/Pervert also challenges the conventions of portraiture by having Opie’s head covered by a gimp mask so that the viewer has no access to her face - she denies them a way to access her identity and instead evokes a confrontation with SM and pain and the questions posed above. Indirectly Self-Portrait/Pervert responds to the politics of Pulp Fiction that invokes a popular culture version of SM by making the gimp on/scene, while concurrently the real queers and SM subculture remain obscene, off stage, silenced, censored. Opie in Self-Portrait/Pervert and related works from around this period challenged the ongoing demonization of SM and the censoring of transgressive queer art which includes hostility from ‘normalized’ gays and lesbians. Self-Portrait/Pervert symbolizes the silences and the obliteration of identity that queers experience by heteronormative culture and other gays and lesbians; it is a work born out of the AIDS epidemic, which turns the pain associated with SM into a political statement to the point where the images test the limits of legibility, both in the extremity of the image of cutting and piercing and the gimp mask’s erasure of the face as a point of identification. Opie explains the impetus behind the self-portrait:

‘Perverts’ [sic] is a very angry piece. I was pissed off. I really wanted to make that piece because of what was happening culturally in the US: the [NEA] censorship, the fuss around the Mapplethorpe show and what was happening in mainstream gay culture. All of a sudden mainstream gays and lesbians were calling themselves ‘normal’ and yet a lot of communities were being pushed further and further out in a certain way.’ (Blessing 2008: 16)

Opie also goes on to describe Self-Portrait/Pervert as ‘a decorative image of pride; for people outside that subculture, it is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down’ (2008: 16) and she means those normalized gays and lesbians as much as the assumed audiences for Pulp Fiction. Despite an obvious delineation of these two texts, Pulp Fiction and Self-Portrait/Pervert, nonetheless get yoked together in reference to Mapplethorpe’s SM pictures as Stockton remarks in her analysis of Pulp Fiction’s black and queer debasement and shaming that ‘Tarantino's film puts into motion images reminiscent of Mapplethorpe's photography' (2006: 104).  Mapplethorpe and the discourses around his photographs of gay leathermen and SM is a thread that links many of the ideas raised in this article about representation, the reification and reception of SM in culture as something risky and to be feared, horror being continually evoked but also as a source of pride and defiance. […]

Bringing Out the Gimp: Fashioning the SM Imaginary

Gary Needham has just written an article for a special pornography issue of Fashion Theory (due 2014) that examines the cultural power associated with the gimp and the gimp mask in both popular culture and art. The gimp is a clothed or costumed SM body, frequently a submissive that often wears a leather or rubber costume that covers and effectuates the entire body including the face. The gimp is also a representation of SM that circulates throughout fashion and film and other forms of popular culture. Since the gimp’s first outing and naming in the ‘bringing out the gimp’ scene from the film Pulp Fiction (1994) it has become the byword for the head-to-toe leather SM look that has been appropriated by a popular culture as way of sensationalising and exploiting the relationship between clothing, fetishism, and transgression. As a counterpoint to the popular or mainstream image of SM the article also explores how the artists perceived to be transgressive and controversial, Catherine Opie and Robert Mapplethorpe, have represented the gimp, not as an index of horror or transgressive style rather as an affirmative image of their own SM communities that, while still intended to shock, is an defiant attempt to rescue or reclaim the gimp from its negative associations. 

One of the main points drawn out in the article is the apparent cultural power associated with the gimp as something obscene and horrific that constructs what Gayle Rubin calls ‘the leather menace’. The gimp is character and a representation that retains disturbing and provocative qualities as a ‘symbolic exercise of social risk’ (McClintock 2003: 237) generating a range of controversial and pornographic meanings both on/scene (as literally seen) and ‘obscene’ across film, art, fashion, and popular culture. The article’s is concerned with some of those meanings, the textual and sexual politics of the gimp as a representation of SM for example, in Pulp Fiction the gimp allows racism and gay SM to almost be one and the same thing; Pulp Fiction’s gimp is a costumed embodiment of gay SM horror!  SM imagery in popular culture attempts to capture ‘menace’ and ‘risk’ and yet simultaneously contain that risk by misrepresenting the axis of power, rendering conventionally masochistic clothing designed for submissive binding and sensory deprivation in to the attire of sadistic monsters, serial killers, and torturers. Gimps in popular culture are often the stuff of nightmares. As a counter-point to this popular fantasy the article goes on to investigate the ‘real’ gimps that appear in Robert Mapplethorpe photographic chronicle of his SM community in the 1970s in addition to more recent artists like Catherine Opie (both of whom have images of their work reproduced in the article by permission from the Guggenheim collection and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation). Opie appears in her own Self-Portrait/Pervert  (1994) sitting in front of chintzy brocade wallpaper wearing a gimp mask, lettering freshly cut in to her bleeding skin which reads ‘pervert’, and pierced along each arm with forty-six evenly spaced temporary needles. Why would Opie make an image that is so difficult to look at? Why would anyone do that to their body? Why would a self-portrait deny access to the artist’s face? Is it a response to Pulp Fiction SM phobia? These are important questions Self-Portrait/Pervert provokes and hopefully that the article answers.

Fashioning the East-Asian Screen: conference announcement

Centre member Gary Needham is co-organizing this event with colleagues in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University.

CALL FOR PAPERS/PARTICIPANTS FASHIONING THE EAST-ASIAN SCREEN, 3-4th May 2012, Nottingham Castle, UK.

It is no coincidence that almost simultaneously in the1890s the very first issue of Vogue appears and the birth of cinema takes place. The invention of modern life involves this parallel between fashion and screen histories. However, most of the emphasis in this relationship is celebrated and documented through American and European cinema. While the relationship between fashion and Western cinemas has already been explored in a number of important publications there has been scant attention to similar themes and issues when it comes to non-Western cinemas. This two-day event seeks to address this gap both in our knowledge about fashion and the screen and the role that fashion, clothing, style, costume, and design plays in East-Asian cinemas. We are also interested in how the screen has influenced fashion cultures in the region. Furthermore, we wish to consider the concept of the screen and East-Asia in their broadest sense to include all screens not just cinema but also television to new media and similarly we intend the concept of East-Asia to be fluid and transcultural rather than limited and fixed. Our primary aim with this event is to begin to map an East-Asian context in terms of the multiple and mutual contacts between fashion and the screen. 

We seek 20 minute papers or 40 minute workshop presentations and we would invite all proposals that consider the connection between fashion and the screen in the context of East-Asia. We would like to see a spread of historical periods represented as well as different disciplinary perspectives and positions. Some suggested topics might include fashion and costume as an element of mise en scene, film stars, costume design, studio films, fashion in film magazines and film in fashion magazines, period films and fashion/costume orientated genres, fashion Orientalism in Western-Cinemas, fashion and modernity, the influence of the screen on the broader East-Asian fashion culture.
Deadline for paper submission is Friday 30th of March 2012. Please send abstracts and proposals with a short bio to Gary Needham. 

Event Details
This event will take place on the 3rd and 4th of May 2012 and is a collaboration between Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery running in tandem with the exhibition of Chinese textiles Living in Silk. Attendance is free but places are very limited due to the unique Castle venue and priority will be given to participants who propose a paper or workshop. There are two confirmed keynote speakers Dr Pamela Church-Gibson (London College of Fashion) and Dr Tamar Jeffers-McDonald (University of Kent). The Thursday evening reception in Nottingham Trent University’s Bonington Gallery will include a performance based installation by MA Framework students and Lucia Tong choreography for Dance4 relating to the theme of the event.