Death-style: An essay film investigation of 1980s images of gay male depravity through the lens of 'queer negativity'

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

As LGBTQ+ culture becomes assimilated into the mainstream in the West, this practice-led research considers whether 1980s representations of the depraved male homosexual are to be viewed solely within the framework of the medico-legal pathologisation of homosexuality or whether they might also communicate the notion of a 'queer threat' to mainstream culture. The research will investigate whether recent theoretical ideas about 'queer negativity' can be utilised within the cinematic language of the essay film to augment and progress the re-examination of 1980s case studies of 'gay male depravity.' At the turn of the century, the photographic image gave visibility to the homosexual. In 'Picturing Deviancy', Stuart Marshall describes homosexuality's evolution from sin to disease as part of 'the medicalisation of deviancy which was to result in a proliferation of new social identities... many of which were to be witnessed and catalogued in the evidence of photography.' Whilst early LGBT studies tended to assert the legitimacy of gay lives, the recent 'turn to the negative' in queer theory engages with the history of queer abjection. Jack Halberstam has written of 'queer darkness, a strategy of reading as well as a way of being in the world.' Lee Edelman links homosexuality to the death drive, positioning queerness in opposition to the 'familial narrativity of reproductive futurism'. Exploiting cinema's 'poetic, transportive and, if not irrational, then a-rational' qualities and the essay film's construction of argument through juxtaposed images and sound, the research will examine how problematic queer representations from the past might be used to position present day queer existence in terms of a progressive, radical opposition to heteronormativity