This blog post is based on a piece I was commissioned to write for the programme for a new theatrical production of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee adapted by Chris Goode.
Tag Archives: Film
Queerama – Docfest 2017
Thoughts on Queerama as Queer History.
The history of queer representation in film is sometimes the history of not being easily seen. It can be the history of having to work really hard to find yourself represented. It can be the history of having to work really hard with what you are given, when you are represented as the freak, the pervert, the duplicitous spy, the blackmailer.
Queerama for me, was the story of how people have negotiated the identities that have been imposed on them. As a history Queerama shows us a series of outside definitions of queer identities that have had to be negotiated; homosexuality, for example, has been seen as a sin, an illness, to an act of dissidence. Sexualities and their identities have been legislated and defined from above, diagnosed by sexologists, feared for contagion, dissected like a guinea pig, but they have also been squeezed through the cracks.
On Pride
So in keeping with the more recent tone of NTWICH I’m going to start this post with a confession. I avoided seeing the film Pride for nearly 16 months and only eventually watched it because I had to.
In the end I watched it because Catherine Grant very kindly invited me to speak at an event that she organised with Diarmaid Kelliher, on Pride and its Precursors and I was too honoured, and too embarrassed, to say no. When the film first came out I ducked and dived out of numerous press requests to comment on it. I had toyed with the idea of presenting at the symposium without actually having watched the film, maybe as a sort of thought experiment. I’d floated the idea over drinks with the talented historian Ben Jones from UEA but lost my confidence after he described some of the scenes I might have missed out on (the alien invasion and massive shoot out at the end).
FOOTLOOSE AND THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE
This post is based on a speech that I gave as part of UCU industrial action I had proposed that Union members and students shared our two hour strike on 28th January 2014 by watching the 1984 film Footloose. I’m not sure how I got away with it, but I did. Here is how I explained why to those who came to watch the film.