Author: hcoleman

From The Edge of The City

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From the edge of the city was probably the first film of the ones we’ve watched that I genuinely didn’t understand or connect with. The plot felt rather vague and disjointed, all the white Russian men looked the same to me so I struggled knowing who was who, and the portrayal and treatment of women made me fairly uncomfortable. This is not to say I hated the film, but as I watched it I knew it was not made for me.  

The lack of representation, and the male point of view the film was told through, were apparent to me the entire time. However, the reading about New Queer Cinema really put this in context. At the beginning of the reading, I was pumped about a movement that questioned norms and was defiant to society. I personally love defiance. But when it became clear to me they were only defiant to the parts of society that didn’t include them, and not to the patriarchal and racist side, I feel like it lost any actual edge it had. This is not to dismiss the important influence of NQC, as it helped queer cinema at the larger scale and I acknowlegde that, but that I understand and agree with the critques it received from within the queer community.

The role women were given in this film made me uncomfortable and frustrated on multiple levels. Obviously it sucks when women are used and depicted as pawnwable objects at the discretion of mens decisions, the reference to them in the film as “it”, “whores”, etc, sucks. I understand this happens in real life, and real life women are caught in sex traffic rings, and have to prostitute themselves to stay alive. The portrayal of real women’s struggles in not something I gripe with. I struggle with the utter lack of female perspective or justice given to the female characters in the film, along with the strong presence of male gaze. I just once wanted to hear how a woman was feeling, I wanted at least one complicated female character that didn’t serve as an extension of a man or was viewed through male desire. The women in this film were spineless wet paper towels, their existence in the film was purely to serve men, and they deserved even one redeeming moment. I acknowledge this issue is obviously not isolated to this film or this time period, but it still warrants commenting.

I commemorate this films dedication to, (excuse my french) fuck a positive portrayal. I like the idea of rejecting positive representation because queer people should not have to be wholesome, upstanding civilians to get respect. We need queer characters where their queerness is apart of their identity and not just their entire narrative purpose and definition as a character. I think there is a defining line between positive representation and realistic representation. Solely positive representation washes over the humanity of queer people, it says they cannot be real and also acceptably queer. Characters should not be vilified or glorified because they are queer, but queer people should be given the justice of being human.

All About This Week

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Week 6 focused on the existence of queer spaces. We watched the film All About My Mother by Pedro Almodóvar, and read the piece Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam. All About My Mother is a mellow dramatic film full of relationships never depicted before. It gives breath to the statement “Cinema makes queer spaces possible”. Which is what Halberstam discusses in Queer Time and Place, it’s a piece about director Almodovar and themes across his different films, but it focuses on All About My Mother.

We discussed the importance of repetition in All About My Mother, everything happens more than once, just not always in the same way. The repetition builds important motifs in the film, journeys or traveling being one of them. There are many journeys in this movie, physical between cities, symbolic in relationships, and journeys with gender and identity. Not all this traveling has an end point, continuity and liquifying previously clear boarders is central to this film. We are invited to create a space where the ideas of authenticity and a strong binary do not need to exist. 

The name of the film implies its content will be all about someones mother, but the someone we assume the film will be told from the point of view of, dies in the beginning part of the film. For the rest of the film we must then ask, well whose mother is she? Manuela fills many maternal roles throughout the film, while still mourning her son, but she becomes so much more than just a mother. We are able to see many maternal, caring, relationships, without the presence of a mother and kin dynamic. In many ways, Manuela becomes everyone’s mother. 

Queer Time and Place points out there are no male relationships in this film, and there is no depiction of male desire. This is the reason I enjoyed this film so thoroughly. The female characters, and therefore the audience vicariously, got to explore their identities without the presence of male desire, a privilege real life women barely get to experience–if ever. Especially in media, the male gaze is so present, for the majority of films it was designated as the point of view films should be designed for. Women are consistently objectified and sexualized. For trans women and drag queens, they are traditionally only allowed to exist as sex objects, or objects to mock or awe at, like circus performers. Seeing their identities treated with respect, and not something up for debate, is an incredible and liberating site to see. The liquefaction and destruction of solid boarders and definitions of both identities and relationships in this movie is a rare but important modern presentation. This film allowed women to exist not as love interests or mothers, but as whole people.

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Welcome!

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Hello! Welcome to my blog. I categorized the post by week to your right, or you can just scroll on down to see them! I enjoyed this project, so I hope you enjoy reading it!

Gender Performativity

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Week Four centered on gender performativity and how it relates to queerness. Performative actions are those that are authoritative in their performance, like baptisms for example. It is an act that produces which it claims. Gender performativity is socially and historically constructed, we are productions of gender, and through this performativity our identity is established.  As we discussed in lecture, gender functions within a system of prohibitions, taboos, and threats of punishment if one does not follow the proper gender performativity. The objective of this system is to preserve stable notions of masculinity and femininity. This is how we understand queerness as a force of opposition to performativity. Homosexuality is is a taboo of this system, making homosexual people outsiders of the social norm. Film makes visible the power of these gender norms, and through cinema we are able to explore the open meshes of queerness and better understand it. We studied gender performativity through the film Tomboy, and the piece Critically Queer. 

This week struck a personal chord with me. As a small child, I wanted to be a boy like my brother and my father, I wore my brothers old dirt biking shirts (if I wore a shirt at all), and I followed them around. My mother enrolled me in ballet, she put me in big poofy skirts and pink bikinis. For my birthday, Christmas, and easter, I was given polly pockets, bratz dolls, and stuffed animals. In elementary school I was nothing short of a tomboy, I wore jorts and big t shirts, I worked hard to beat the boys when racing (and believe me I did), my friends and I swore against bras and makeup and watching Hannah Montana, and we spent hours playing video games. When taking family photos my sisters and mother dressed me up and put makeup on me (to my disdain) and asked me to be lady like. In middle school I began noticing the popular and pretty girls, how they got all the boys attention, and how feminine they were. I finally succumbed to the relenting peer pressure (and blatant bullying), and in high school was as feminine as one could be. I wore a full face of makeup, long acrylic nails, and push up bras, and for awhile it was okay, but I still didn’t feel complete the way I thought I should. 

“Tomboy” made me realize a lot about my childhood I hadn’t previously. I am riddled with wondering how much of who I am today is who I actually am, who I actually want to be, and how much of it is constructed through social and familial pressures to be the person I “should” be. When we discuss that through cinema we can explore queerness, this is my reality, this is how I have learned so much about myself. Film has allowed me to live vicariously through someone else, for at least a little bit of time I can live a different life, be a different person. I have lost so much of my life to mental illness and self hatred, but through cinema I get new opportunities and a look on life. I don’t think I would have realized my queerness if it weren’t for queer cinema. I have always felt different, and seeing my experiences validated on screen gave me so much more than I ever knew I needed. I still have a lot of self realization to go, but cinema helps give me the community support I need for it.

That’s so gay.

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Week three we started to discuss the importance of language and how it pertains to identity. The term “Gay” is a modern invention. It was not until the 60’s and 70’s liberation movement did the term begin to mean homosexual. It was used as apart of the movement for the political goals of visibility and equality. The word “Queer” used to be a slur for homosexual people, but the LGBTQ community reclaimed the word and nowadays use it as apart of their identity (hence the Q in LGBTQ). We read in Queer World Cinema that queer became a political standpoint that refuses minority and identity politics, queer was a more radical critique of heteronormativity. It’s important to remember that all identities are historically and socially constructed. Heteronormativity is the normalization of heterosexuality and a gender binary that matches one assigned sex at birth. Queer is all the possibilities, gaps, overlaps, and open meshes of gender.

We read about heteronormativity in Tendencies, the author stated that it is when all institutions speak with one voice. It is the lining up of assumptions and expectations of a subjects place in social life. They gave the example of Christmas, all the stores are filled with decorations, all the media talks about it, the government and schools close, every voice is saying go be with your heterosexual, nuclear, and christian family. Heteronormativity is a force used to reinforce the status quo. However, cinema helps make queer spaces possible. In Queer World Cinema, they listed dozens of spaces that are able to be made queer spaces because of queer cinema. Truthfully, queer cinema is everywhere and anywhere we want it to be, it is cinema that in any form explores outside the historically and socially accepted norms. And it is through this cinema that we ourselves are able to explore and understand queerness.

With our discussion of queer identities we watched the film “Law of Desire” by Pedro Almodóvar. This film was the very first to receive the Teddy Award, an international film award dedicated specifically for LGBTQ cinema. It surrounds a gay director, Pablo, and his relationships. Specifically, one with a psychotic and obsessive man that will stop at nothing to have him, including murdering his former lover and seducing his transgender sister while he is in the hospital. This dramatic film handles queer relationships very realistically, from the alias’s they have to use when writing letters, to Pablos sisters issues with dating men as a trans woman. What I liked about this film is that none of the characters personalities or service in the film was centered or dependent on their identities as members of the queer community. The flamboyant gay bff trope is a personal pet peeve when it comes to “diverse” cinema. This film felt ahead of its time as far as its portrayal of queer people as real people with complicated identities. It was very raw, to the point of making me uncomfortable at times, but I believe that was the entire point, and that’s what makes it one of my favorites. 

The beginning

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The first two weeks began with an introduction to gay and lesbian film scholarship in the aftermath of gay liberation in the 70’s. We began our discussion with Stonewall and the politics of visibility, denouncing stereotypes and promoting positive representation of LGBTQ in the media. For a long time the representation of gay people in the media was very negative, if there was any representation at all. Week one we watched “The Celluloid Closet”, which is a documentary about queer representation in Hollywood. It went through the progression of all the different characters we have seen gay people negatively portrayed as (ie. “fairies”). While the film is not up to date and is missing at least two decades of queer cinema, much of the critiques it makes about the film industry are still relevant today. 

In our introduction to gay liberation we were also given a basic understanding of gay culture, as cinema is apart of culture and culture is inextricably tied with the queer community. We read Gay Male Culture by Richard Dyer, which talked about how culture is societally viewed as “other” and feminine, therefore it is a place where gay men can find belonging because they are also deemed other and feminine. Culture gives queers a place to build a community without judgement. Because it is a place where people can be different culture also helps shape gay identity, it is something they are allowed to consider theirs so they strongly identify with it. This is why it’s so important to understand culture in order to understand queerness.

We also watched the film “Loose Cannons” directed by Ferzan Özpetek which tells the story of a Gay man struggling with coming out to his family. The film parallels leaving the family business with coming out as gay, it is an act of betrayal against your family unit and goes against what your family expects and wants of you. The main characters plans to come out are foiled when his brother does it before him, his role then becomes the main care taker of the family while they deal with the loss of his brother; at one point his father goes as far to say “you’re all I have left”. The film highlights the complexities of coming out and being public with ones identity even modernly, and how some gay people have to choose between their family and being themselves. 

“Coming Out” was a large topic of discussion in class. For a long time, someone was not gay until they came out and publicly identified as such. It has become such a large part of Western gay culture we have a national coming out day. It was a large part of the liberation movement, queer people were tired of hiding and pretending they didn’t exist for the comfort of others. Coming out and being public was an act of rebellion against a heteronormative society that wanted to keep gay people hidden. Now, it has become sort of nuanced, the idea that someone has to come out to be considered gay can reinforce heteronormativity because it assumes everyone is straight until stated otherwise. It’s a very convoluted issue, but now a days its much more up to the individual and what they feel is necessary for their journey.