New Queer Cinema

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New Queer Cinema is the seemingly simultaneous appearance on the independent film circuit of movies dealing openly and even aggressively with queer culture, politics, and identity that began in the early 1990s. A more modern definition of "New Queer Cinema" denotes any film with homosexual content as part of the genre.

In 1992, Sight & Sound magazine printed an article by North American Feminist and critic, B. Ruby Rich. The article, which gathered together Rich’s experiences of, and reflections upon, the strong gay presence on the previous year’s film festival circuit, effectively coined the phrase "New Queer Cinema".[1]

As B. Ruby Rich also wrote in the Village Voice,[1] she described films that were radical in form and aggressive in their espousal of sexual identities which challenged both the heteronormative status quo and the promotion of positive images of lesbians and gay men that had been advocated by the gay liberation movement for more than ten years: films such as Todd Haynes's Poison (1990), Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels (1991), Derek Jarman's Edward II, Tom Kalin's Swoon (1992), and Gregg Araki's ground breaking "The Living End"

These directors were making their films at a time when the gay community was still reeling from the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and the neo-conservative political wave brought on by the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and later George H.W. Bush in the United States of America (US) and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) during the same decade. Jarman himself had been diagnosed with AIDS in 1986.

Simultaneously, queer theory and politics had begun to take hold in academic circles. Queer contends that "gay," and the concepts of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality," are pre-constructed identities. Queer theory asserts that as these are the products of a specific era of social history, they are arbitrary and that there will come a time when they are no longer relevant categorizations. When Rich noted that many films were beginning to represent sexualities which were unashamedly neither fixed nor conventional, the phrase "New Queer Cinema" was coined.

Contents

[edit] New Queer Cinema figures

[edit] Directors

[edit] Producers

[edit] Actors

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b History of New Queer Cinema, webpage:

[edit] Further Reference

[edit] See also

[edit] External links