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.

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.

The Inequality, Culture and Difference research seminar series is proud to present…

Re-enactment and Critical History

Angelos Koutsoukaris, University of Leeds

Wednesday 13^th November, 1-2pm MAE101 – ALL WELCOME!

Reenactment as a mode on inquiry about the past and as an artistic practice has recently become prevalent. Reenactments of the American civil war, of WWI and WWII have turned to tourist attractions in the USA. Reenactment is also an in important mode of practice in television but also in theatre and performance art with many experimental groups, such as the Wooster group, re-enacting past performances by theatre practitioners such as Jerzy Grotowski, but also documented events like the infamous Town Hall affair that took place in 1971 in New York. In cinema, recent films like The Act of Killing (2012), The Look of Silence (2012) and Theatre of War (2018) extend a cinematic tradition of reenactment firmly rooted in the works of Jean Rouch, Errol Morris, and Peter Watkins. 

In this paper, I intend to join the scholarly conversation on documentary reenactment going beyond the memory studies debates that have become prevalent in the academy in the past three decades. I am interested in thinking about reenactment as a mode of inquiry and practice that is not just in service of commemorating victims from the past. Instead, I want to look at how reenactment can enable us to recover untold stories from the past with the view to troubling linear approaches to history rooted in the Enlightenment paradigm.

Angelos Koutsourakis is a University Academic Fellow in World Cinema. He is the author of Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) and the co-editor of The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). He is currently co-editing (with Thomas Austin) Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).