Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
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Boys Will Be Boys With Boys: the Real and queer subjectivity in film / Bradley High
Introduction
<1> Generic conventions within queer cinema (re)present discursive formations of queer bodies that reflect public projects of identity location along a binary axis of sexual identity performance. According to these conventions the queer subject is limited along this axis to adopting a heterosexual vernacular of identity performance or a vernacular of camp and the spectacular as a means of delineation/differentiation from the heterosexual majority. Whether passing or rejecting to pass, these generic conventions are attempts at normativization of the queer self that have as their cathexis narrative constructions of the closet and closeted-ness. The queer self is always already positioned discursively in relation to the closet which is modeled in/through heterosexist subject positionings of identity (re)presentation and performance. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, "'[c]losetedness' itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence - not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it" (3). There are multiple modalities of speaking in relation to one's sexuality, sexual desires, and sexual practices, the manner in which they are spoken about - or not spoken about - for the queer subject, is relationally positioned to the closet and imbibed with heterosexist notions of normative sexuality/sexual practices and the privilege of publicity that hetero-sexual practices are afforded.
<2> The closet, as a governing structure of queer communities and identity formations, operates as a strategy of self-regulation; a structure of power by and for the queer subject as an attempt to reinscribe the queer body with social and political agency in relation to heterosexist discourses of normative public identity formations and performances. In terms of governing the individual collective, Foucault notes that, "what government has to do with is not territory but, rather, a sort of complex composed of men and things" ("Governmentality" 208-209). [1] "Things," for Foucault being "men in their relation to . . . things that are customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, and so on . . . " ("Governmentality" 208-9). Government, then, is not a function of the state but a function of the populace as a means of self-regulation in accordance with normative codes of (public) identity formation. Governmentality of the queer subject regulates the collective organization of (re)presentational and performative strategies deployed by queer cultural formations in an attempt to mediate their collective organization in relation to the heterosexual majority.
<3> Generic conventions of queer
bodies/identities in queer cinema, like the closet, are fabricated
in/through queer culture as a means of reproducing normative codes of
identity performance. The mode of self-knowledge created through
generic conventions of queer cinema is one which constitutes the queer
subject as analogous to heterosexual subjects with the exception that
queer subjects distinctly lack visible markers of sexual expression,
pleasure, and desire as opposed to our heterosexual counterparts who
enjoy a proliferation of visual representations of hetero-sexuality.
This essay will attempt to interrogate the imbrication of New Queer
Cinema (and its legacy on contemporary queer cinema) with Sedgwick and
Foucault's notions of heterocentric relations of power as they exist
and are manifested in/through an internalized and externalized
regulatory economy of (re)presentational practices of queer
subjectivities. Additionally, understanding queer subjectivities as
being rooted in sexual difference from the heterosexual hegemony, this
essay will explore the boundaries of (re)presenting and "realizing"
queer sexuality in cinema, employing Jacques Lacan's description of
the Real as a missed encounter that avoids (complete)
assimilation/recuperation in and by the Imaginary and the Symbolic.
<4>(Re)presentations of queer characters in
cinema, once deeply coded and requiring queerness to be read into a
text, now enjoy a heightened level of on-screen visibility. In 1992, B.
Ruby Rich announced that "[t]he New Queer Cinema has come full
circle: the boys and their movies have arrived," adding that New
Queer Cinema is "engaged in the beginnings of a new queer
historiography, capable of transforming this decade, if only the door
stays open long enough. For him, for her, for all of us" ("New
Queer Cinema" 22). To some extent the door has remained open;
however, it would appear that our closet has been ransacked by a host
of unwanted house guests. As Rich argues in "Queer and Present
Danger," "from the beginning the New Queer Cinema was a more
successful term for a moment than a movement" (Sight and
Sound March 2000). Indeed, the angst and sense of political
action that existed as the undercurrent of films like Greg Araki's The
Living End (1992) or Jennie Livingston's Paris is
Burning (1990), which characterize New Queer Cinema, becomes
diluted in the late 90s with mainstream cinema's appropriation of the
queer body as a narrative and historical project by the (outwardly)
heterosexual majority.
<5> The New Queer Cinema (NQC) of the 1990s, in
its attempt to refigure and to narrativize the queer body and therefore
to reinscribe the queer subject with greater political agency than
previously afforded within the larger normative framework of hegemonic
(heterosexist) society, advanced notions of presence and visibility.
Nevertheless, NQC became appropriated by hegemonic cultural and
cinematic forms which privileged a de-sexualization of the queer body.
This appropriation forms the corpus of films that emerged in the mid to
late 90s and which constitute the genre of queer cinema today. Though
taking up the queer body as the subject of cinematic narrative promoted
visibility of queer communities, and on some level acceptance, it
simultaneously disavowed queer sexuality, a move which de-politicized
and infantilized the (queer) self.
<6> Queer cinema currently privileges
heterocentric (re)presentational strategies which position queer
subjectivities within the confluence of the Imaginary and the Symbolic
orders, allowing for the interpretive framework of each given film to
articulate "queerness" as discursively formed and framed. While the
discursivity of queer subjectivities is certainly central to our
understanding and imagining of queer subjects, the (Lacanian) Real of
queer subjectivities is to be found in queer corporeality: that bodily
expression of queer sexual practices which differentiate queer
subjectivities from that of our heterosexual counterparts. There is but
one piece of our identity frameworks which we, as queer subjects, all
share: that which is distinct from heterosexual subjects, how we as
queer subjects practice and perform our sexual subjectivities.
<7> Current (re)presentational practices of
queer characters in cinema privilege a de-sexualization of queer
subjects: however, emerging (re)presentations are beginning to
reinscribe queer subjects with images and imaginings of queer sex and
sexuality. Though attempts have been made to combat the disavowal of
queer sexual subjectivities, queer cinema fails to achieve any great
unification of queer subjects with queer subjectivities. While
de-sexualized (re)presentations of queer bodies in film dissemble the
Real of queer subjectivities through an abject denial of queer sex and
sexuality by way of generic conventions which differ subjectivity to
discursive practices rather than corporeal Real(ity), sexualized
representations of queer subjects in film, in their mitigation of queer
sexual subjectivities and in positioning the publicness of sexuality as
the object of the gaze, represent a missed encounter with the Real. In
failing to articulate the Real of queer subjectivities, the locus of
which is in the corporeality of queer sexual difference, cinema fails
to form any semblance of a truly queer genre of film: as such, what we
classify as queer cinema is in truth, a queering of heterosexual
subjective positionings and not an independent generic classification.
<8> In her book Presence &
Desire, Jill Dolan interrogates the (re)presentation of
sexuality in performance noting the lack thereof as an oppressive and
repressive marginalizing narrative (179) which de-sexualizes the queer
body and re-contextualizes it within a "heterosexual frame" (192).
This de-sexualization effectively neutralizes the political power and
disruptive potential of the queer subject by removing the locus of
difference. Narratives of the queer body become subsumed by
heterosexual ideologies of lifestyle and social economy, positioning
the de-sexualized queer subject within heterosexist hegemonic norms of
the Imaginary and Symbolic orders. Though many films within queer
cinema position their narrative as part of a larger project of queer
visibility and story-telling, the queer body is sexual (as is the
heterosexual body) and to detach queer subjects from the Real of queer
subjectivities is to tell a homogenized, heterosexist (re)vision of
queer identity.
<9> In examining Émile Gaudreault's Mambo
Italiano (2003), and Carrie Preston's 29th and Gay
(2005), two films situated within contemporary histories of queer
cinema, I will explore how the appropriation of the queer body and the
lack of expressed sexuality reproduces heteronormative
(re)presentational practices within the context of a queer narrative.
In contrast to these films, Todd Stephens' Another Gay Movie
(2006) explicitly images queer sexuality which, I would argue, attempts
to re-politicize the queer body by reuniting the self with sexual acts.
However, the imbrication of queer sex and sexuality with notions of
publicness in this film refocus the gaze to interrogate queer sexual
activities and spatiality, rather than undertaking a strict
problematization of the association between lack and sexual
subjectivities in the queer body.
<10>The normativizing project of queer cinema, which disassociates the self from the sex, may be a response to queer communities' calls for acceptance within hegemonic society through a recognition of who someone is, not what someone does. I would argue, however, that this appropriation of a heterocentric discourse enacts a silencing of queer subjectivities that is an effect of both internalized and externalized homophobia central to the (re)production of the closet as the defining structure for queer subjects, and the desire to eradicate difference as a means to "celebrate diversity." To eradicate all markers of difference (i.e., non heterosexual sex) is to disavow the existence and individual agency of not only queer sexual acts, but all those who engage in them. Put differently, to disavow the Real of queer subjectivities is to disavow the existence of the queer subject.
Mainstream Cinema and the Non-Sexual Queer Body
<11> Generic conventions in queer cinema de-sexualize the queer body, eradicating the locus of difference, in favour of articulating the similarities between heterosexual and queer populations. In that sense, contemporary queer cinema represents an abject denial of the Real due primarily to the lack of sexual signifiers and sexual subjectivity employed through the Imaginary and Symbolic orders of hegemonic cinematic practices. The trauma of castration (the de-sexualization of the queer subject) renders the Real unassimilable to queer audiences in that this castration reflects the continued (self)subjugation to the heterosexual hegemony as an attempted means to mediate queer entry into dominant discourses (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts 55).
<12> Mambo Italiano and 29th
and Gay are representative of the influence of hegemonic
norms of identity (re)presentation within queer cinema in that both
films (re)present the queer body within a de-sexualized frame. That is
not to say that sexuality and sexual acts are not present within the
diegesis of these films, but that sexuality and sexual acts exist as
connotative. With their emphasis on queerness as a linguistic formation
rather than the Real of queer subjectivity, queerness in cinema becomes
relegated to/limited by the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As Alexander
Doty notes:
It is in the queerness that circulated rather widely (if not always openly) in mass culture that I find the most frustrating and hopeful ground for queer studies in and outside of the academy - frustrating because most of this mass culture queerness remains discursively, politically, and economically beneficial only to straights and straight culture, framed and understood as it is still is largely through the language, codes, and systems of capitalism, patriarchy, connotation, and heterocentrism. (103-4)
Though Mambo Italiano and 29th
and Gay are often classified as queer texts, they employ a
lexicon of hetero-linguistic ontological formations in the construction
and representation of the queer body. Privileging a de-sexualized
identity formation, the queer subject is homogenized with heterosexual
cultural formations and practices allowing for an equalization/negation
of social and political disruption which permits queer subjects an
entry into hegemonic social discourses by eradicating the signifiers of
queer difference.
<13> The opening sequence of Mambo
Italiano reifies heterosexual hegemony within the narrative
through the use of an establishing sequence which begins with an
extreme long shot of a city market populated by (presumably)
heterosexual couples, followed by a medium close up of a heterosexual
couple standing under a tree passionately kissing. What distinguishes
this moment, what establishes heterosexuality as the preferred mode of
sexual representation and expression, is the manner in which
heterosexuality is displayed. Framed on either end by shots of busy
public spaces, the couple is not hidden away in some secluded corner of
a park, but rather in the centre of a populated public space on display
for all to see. The kiss shared by the couple also transgresses the
public/private binary in portraying their tongues passionately
interlocking during their embrace. The presence of such an intimate
organ external to the body represents the accepted visibility of
heterosexuality and hetero-sexual practices. An organ of pleasure is
literally out there for all to see, and is seen in the act of giving
and receiving pleasure.
<14> This sequence, the first thing the viewer
sees, establishes heterosexuality as both the preferred mode of sexual
identification and the lexicon through which sexuality is to be
described (as being or being in relation to). Requiring the
heterocentric language of the patriarchal Other (to the queer subject)
to describe the queer self infantilizes the queer subject. Not having,
or rather, not using one's own semiotic and linguistic formations to
denote the self ontologically, positions the queer subject as always
already lacking in individual and collective agency. As queer subjects,
we are always looking to be taught the language which will allow us to
express our individual subjectivities while simultaneously asking
permission to speak.
<15> Though no such establishment of
heterosexual hegemony exists visually in 29th and Gay
as it does in Mambo Italiano, the film does enact
an overt infantilization of the primary queer character. The opening
sequence is a birthday celebration for James's 29th birthday. Shot
from the first-person perspective, James is sitting on the couch
looking up to his friends and family who surround him. The other
characters in this scene are positioned above him, partially crouching,
all looking down on him: reminiscent of a child's birthday party, the
characters physically position James as inferior, infantilizing and
therefore de-sexualizing his queer subject positioning.
<16> These de-sexualized (re)presentations of
the queer subject are part of a larger project in (queer) visual
culture to reconstruct the queer individual as a universal subject
(Savran 65-6). As David Savran notes, "homosexual subjectivities are
produced as representative not of the perverse but the normative, not
of the subversive but the national" (66). The universalizing project
of the closet which de-sexualizes the queer subject effects a
castration which removes the locus of queer difference, and the Real of
queer subjectivities, allowing for queer subjects to be constructed
in/through dominant discourses as a hetero-like subject sans sexual
activity. Both Mambo Italiano and 29th
and Gay reproduce/propagate the image of the universalized
(closeted) queer subject through the deferral of queer sex and
sexuality and/or the express lack of sexual subjectivity.
<17> For Mambo Italiano,
queer sexuality is connoted: there exists the implication that queer
sex is occurring or about to occur, yet the acts themselves are not
portrayed on camera. This delineation of the Imaginary and the Symbolic
from the Real of queer subjectivities persists throughout the film,
relegating queerness primarily to discursive formations rather than the
Real of queer subjectivities. In our first hint of queer sexuality, we
see Nino and Angelo lying together in a tent in the middle of the
wilderness. As they move closer together, the film cuts to an external
long shot of the tent, allowing the viewer to see only vague
silhouettes of two people moving inside. Visually representing queer
sexuality as shrouded, as something not to be seen, privileges a
privacy of queer sexual expression and actively advocates the
privatization of queer identity (re)presentation. This privatization of
queer sexuality is part of a larger historical universalizing project
which has resulted in the overall sublimation of queer subjectivities
and queer difference in favour of universalizing (read heterocentric)
performative accomplishments which imbricate the queer subject with
heterosexual culture, thereby reifying the queer subject's
entitlement to participate in dominant discursive formations.
<18> This abject denial of the Real of queer
subjectivity that occurs with the removal of the locus of queer
difference articulates the potential social and political power
sexualized (re)presentations afford. For Mambo Italiano
and 29th and Gay, "silence is rendered as pointed and performative as
speech" (Sedgwick 4). The anticipation of queer sexual acts and the
subsequent avoidance of representing these acts visually articulates
the heterocentrist anxiety present within queer communities of our own
sexual potency and political agency.
<19> This is evident in the narrative of 29th
and Gay, which is centred on James' quest for love and romance. Yet,
in the absence of the Real of queer subjectivities, James exists not as
a queer subject but as a heterosexual oddity, a lost and lonely person
looking for individual identity exterior to the body, leading to
misplaced ideas/ideals of fulfillment and gratification in
companionship, not in sexual subjectivity and/or expression. What
elements of queer sexuality are present exist only within the confines
of a darkened gay bar. The grainy and blurred cinematography of these
scenes represent the isolationist and private (re)presentational
practices of queer sexuality in queer cinema. Here, queer sexuality is
out of focus, in the realm of the "not-quite-seen," not quite
visible - a connotated construct. The one queer character who does
demonstrate any type of connection to the Real of queer subjectivities,
Brandon Bouvier, is eventually chastised for his perceived promiscuity.
From that moment on Brandon is no longer seen in intimate scenes for
the remainder of the film. Though perhaps not the intention of the
filmmakers, the result is that queer sexuality is punished for its
expression which leads to self-discipline and regulation, inhibiting
visual representations of queer sexuality and reinforcing an abject
denial of the Real of queer subjectivities.
<20> At the climax of the film it would seem
James finally will have the chance to become romantically involved with
someone. James asks the hunky barista, Andy, out for coffee, an
invitation which Andy accepts. They share a moment of sexual tension
before getting into Andy's truck to go out for their first date, but
at the moment when the tension could be alleviated by a kiss, the film
cuts to blackout; James and Andy never visually consummate their
relationship. Though it is implied that there exists a lasting romantic
and intimate relationship between the two men, they exist on-screen in
a strictly platonic fashion. Queer sexuality, then, is represented
asexually. True, there is an acknowledgement of sexual activities in
the film, represented by the sex swing that James receives as a gift
for his birthday from his parents, yet the swing, and by extension
James' potential sexual activities, becomes an object of ridicule
within the diegesis of the film and therefore for the viewer.
<21> The disassociation of the Real of queer subjectivities in queer cinema allows for the continued incursion of hetero-linguistic structural systems into prescriptive and proscriptive (re)presentational practices. As Ellie Ragland-Sullivan notes, "Lacan described the Imaginary as that which infuses the unconscious into consciousness to create discontinuities, inconsistencies and irruptions. Continuity resides, rather in the Symbolic verbal chain that connects, labels, and orients Imaginary incidents, so giving import, perpetuity, and reality to otherwise solipsistic perception" (152). The Symbolic, as that which facilitates meaning-making processes is a fabrication/function of (heterocentric) hegemonic discursive practices. As such, the Symbolic demarcates the borders of normative and acceptable subjectivities, privileging those that serve to reinforce its own dominance and regulatory authority. This structure inherently disallows any queering of the Symbolic and queer explorations of the Imaginary. However, the queer Imaginary(ies) is distinct from any heterosexual Imaginary in that our Imaginary is predicated first and foremost on our sexual difference (difference in sexual preferences and activities); that being the case, a heterocentric Symbolic order is always-already incapable of articulating queer subjectivities and always-already incapacitating for the formation of queer subjectivities. The completeness with which the queer subject is visually (re)presented in 29th and Gay belies the fragmented and disassociated subjectivities of the queer collective individual. That James is portrayed as an out gay man contently coexisting with hegemonic social and cultural formations speaks to the organizational and fabricating (read normativizing) discourse of the Imaginary and Symbolic order present in queer cinema.
<22> Whereas 29th and Gay
treats
queer sex and sexuality as something to be managed (either through
humour or chastisement), acts of queer sexuality in Mambo
Italiano are implied but not seen. One example of such
treatment is in the scene where Nino enters the bedroom in his boxer
briefs to an awaiting Angelo, only to stub his toe followed by a quick
cut to another (non-sexual) scene. This scene is part of a larger
sequence that speeds through the beginning of the couple's
relationship, the speed of which glosses over queer intimacy and
sexuality that the queer viewer can expect to be present in the
relationship. The tone of this film, though distinctly written as a
queer narrative, panders to a heterosexual audience allowing for
multiple representations of hetero-anxiety over queer sexuality. The
one point in the film where queer sexuality is visualized on-screen in
any capacity - and bear in mind both characters are fully clothed and
just kissing - Angelo's sister (a heterosexual character) walks in on
the couple and becomes so disturbed by the sight that she retreats to
the living room and immediately takes a valium to calm herself.
<23> The tactic employed to enact a silencing of
queer sex and sexuality in Mambo Italiano is one of
non-visualization. While the film acknowledges the existence of queer
sexual practices, the only couple to engage in such acts do so
off-screen and ultimately are punished for their transgressions (Nino
leaves Angelo for a heterosexual relationship and Angelo is left
alone). Angelo does, in the end, find what we can presume to be a
loving relationship, but one which is constituted within the public
sphere and, therefore, must abide by the prescribed heterocentric codes
of acceptable conduct. In the final scene of the film we see Angelo
walking through the public gardens alongside his parents and his new
partner, Peter. Here, the couple is presented to the public and in
doing so, the couple agrees to adhere to the regulatory economy of
(re)presentational practices for queer subjectivities. In short,
they're happy because they're "out," but they're allowed to
be out, because they are non-sexual, non-threatening beings. As Babette
Babich notes "because the register of the Real includes existence in
its bodily and natural/social extension, the registers of the Imaginary
and the Symbolic are not incidentally but intrinsically yoked together
with the Real" (52). When considering the primacy and centrality of
the body to queer subjectivity, that queer difference (from
heterosexuality) lies in the difference of bodily pleasure and fantasy,
the Real of queer subjectivities are abjectly denied by
(re)presentational conventions which disavow queer sexuality and queer
sexual activities.
<24> The categorization of queer sexualities
remain largely dependent on the performance of public identities, yet,
within the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders of queer cinema, there
remains an emphasis on this public representation of prohibited and
isolated genital acts as the locus of hetero-anxiety. In The
Matter of Images, Richard Dyer notes that "representations
here and now have real consequences for real people, not just in the
way they are treated . . . but in terms of the way representations
delimit and enable what people can be in any given society" (3).
Generic conventions that represent the queer body as a de-sexualized
body limit the options for public performances of the queer collective
individual to de-sexualized performances.
<25> Nevertheless, the discourse of
public/private representativeness is not as simple, nor as inclusive as
that: because the Real of queer subjectivities are not articulated
through the Imaginary and the Symbolic within hegemonic social
discourses, the queer body is not able to engage with social
hierarchies from a position of/with a performance that incorporates
elements of performed sexual acts. The lack of visible representatives
of sexual activities for the queer self means that if the queer
collective individual is to engage with the dominant hegemony with any
(perceived) element of personal agency, s/he must do so without any
social/visual signifiers of sexual activities. Since the queer
collective individual is always already formed within dominant
discourses of personhood in/through the closet, the collective queer
self is positioned as being required to reenact these heteronormative
representations of queer identity in order to affect social agency.
<26> The discursive practices of the closet
established following New Queer Cinema which obfuscate the Real of
queer subjectivities have left queer communities and queer cultural
producers with a limited economy of (re)presentational modalities. As
Susanna Danuta Walters states, "I believe there are ways in which
this new visibility creates new forms of homophobia (for example, the
good marriage-loving, sexless gay vs. the bad, liberationist,
promiscuous gay) and lends itself to a false and dangerous substitution
of cultural visibility for inclusive citizenship" (10). The
heterocentric generic conventions of queer cinema are indicative of an
internalized homophobia for queer subjects that reflect our abject
positioning resulting from the lack of linguistic and
(re)presentational strategies/practices which involve queer sexuality
and sexual acts. In such a context, to state that one is queer no
longer means anything in relation to dominant discourses of sexual
identity because it no longer includes references to sexual acts. Here,
the Real of queer subjectivities are abjectly denied in favour of more
socially acceptable and socially convenient (re)presentational
practices. However, in removing these references, the queer subject has
removed the source of their identity formation (distinct from the
heterosexual hegemony), merely becoming a non-sexual entity subsumed
into the wider variety of heterosexual practitioners. While this
visibility has afforded perhaps wider acceptance of queer subjects,
that acceptance comes at the cost of a collective disavowal of our
sexual imagings, imaginings and passions. This saturation of the queer
subject into dominant cinema has perpetuated "a new set of pernicious
fictions, subduing dissent by touting visibility as the equivalence of
knowledge" (Walters 12). The knowledge which Mambo Italiano
and 29th and Gay impart to the broader public is
one of socially and politically neutral queer subjectivities as a
result of the de-sexualization of the queer subject and the disavowal
of queer subjectivities.
<27> What these films, and others like them, fail to realize is that queer life is different and that we do experience sex and sexuality in different ways and by different means. However, "[a]s long as the analysis of mass culture remains dependent primarily upon texts, with their unstable representational codes, as the alpha and the omega of proof of queerness, the queerness of and in mass culture will remain 'essentially insubstantial,' as it will remain in the twilight zone of connotation" (Doty xii). What I propose, and what goes against much of the discourses within queer communities, queer cultural products, and discourses in diversity, is that queer subjectivities are different from heterosexual subjectivities and they are different as a result of our sexual practices. Discourses that position queer subjectivities outside sexual acts ignore the central difference of queer subjects from the heterosexual hegemony and the Real of queer subjectivities.
Sexualized (Re)presentations of Queer Bodies
<28> Where de-sexualized (re)presentations of
queer bodies in film represent an abject denial of the Real of queer
subjectivities, sexualized (re)presentations of queer bodies in film,
though proximate to queer subjectivities, remain fundamentally a missed
encounter with the Real. Though sexualized representations of queer
bodies in film form a closer approximation of queer subjectivities,
these (re)presentations are fundamentally metonymic not mimetic. In
following structural and generic conventions of heterosexual cinema,
sexualized representations of queer bodies in film analogize the Real
of queer subjectivities, attenuating the social and political potential
of the Real through incomplete simulations that defer focus to
contextuality rather than subjectivity.
<29> Visual performances of the Real of queer
subjectivities have the capacity to operate as a Brechtian tool to
distance the queer viewer from their imbrication with/dependence on
heterocentric cultural discourses of the closet that prescribe and
proscribe (Ouellette) normative codes of (re)presentation of the queer
body in public spaces. Witnessing the Real of queer subjectivities
would estrange or distance the viewer from the on-screen image, in that
imaging the Real of queer subjectivities is antithetical to
(hetero)normative (re)presentational practices employed/deployed in/by
queer communities through queer cultural products and therefore would
activate an interrogative receptive practice on the part of queer (and
heterosexual) viewers; simultaneously allowing for and compelling
erotic pleasure and discomfort to be experienced. To witness queer
bodies participating in queer acts is not only jarring for the
homophobic heterosexual majority but also, I would argue, for the
individual queer collective who express our own homophobia in a
governmentality of suppression and repression of the Real of queer
subjectivities through constructions of the closet. The distantiation
caused by this missed encounter with the Real is deeply imbricated by
the fear of our own publicness and the publicness of our sexuality and
sexual practices.
<30> What is particularly interesting when
considering Brecht and epic theatre in relation to public receptivity
of the queer subjective Real in cinema is that like epic theatre,
sexualized representations do not reproduce conditions, rather they
reveal them, uncovering conditions through a process of interruptions
(Benjamin 4-5). How we as a queer audience relate to visualizations of
queer sexual acts reveal how and what we see as normative or acceptable
public performances of queer subjectivities. That moment of
embarrassment or shame that follows from public displays of affection
in heterosexual spaces, that feeling of not belonging, that fear of
possible retaliation (though still very much potentially real) reflects
our own drive for self-regulation and governance of public
(re)presentational strategies of queer identity performances as enacted
through the closet. The overt sexualization of queer bodies estranges
the viewer from normative conceptions of narrative flow forcing an
interrogation and re-repositioning of the locus of queer difference,
imbricating queer subjectivities with sexual subjectivity.
<31> Where 29th and Gay
avoids all referentiality to queer sexual activities and Mambo
Italiano disavows the action of queer sex, Another
Gay Movie centralizes queer sexual activities within the
narrative structure. Attempting to refute normative discourses which
position queer identity and sexual practices in relation to the closet,
this film intends to mobilize new knowledges of queer subjectivities
that are not prescribed and proscribed via heterocentric discursive
formations: however, this film fails to attain the Real of queer
subjectivities. During the opening of Another Gay Movie the audience is
confronted with sex as central to the narrative through extra-diegetic
music which plays Barcelona's song titled "Everything Makes Me
Think About Sex." Moving moments later to watch Andy in his attempt
to cover his erection (the outline of which is visible through his
pants) as he walks to the front of the classroom, then directly into a
fantasy sequence where Andy is bent over a desk at the front of the
class having sex with his teacher Mr. Puckov, the publicness of queer
sexuality and sexual acts not only prefigures narrative development but
also the Real of queer subjectivities.
<32> The presence of queer bodies engaging in
sexual acts, visible in public spaces, combined with the character's
gaze fixed towards the viewer during the this initial fantasy sequence
(and during others in the film), attempts to articulate the Real by
operating beyond the boundaries and proscriptive Imaginary and Symbolic
practices of the closet by positioning queer sexuality within the
public sphere, not as an act of transgression but as a normative act.
Though this film sequence foregrounds queer sexual acts within the
frame, it remains a missed encounter with the Real in that the
sexualized body - the Real of queer subjectivities - is not the object
of the intended gaze, rather the imbrication of the body and publicness
is the focus of these sexualized (re)presentations. In that sense, the
"missed encounter is 'the real that lies behind the phantasy'"
of publicness (Lacan qtd. in Babich 51). During this initial sequence,
and throughout the film, queer sex and sexuality is only at play in
relation to publicness thereby privileging the publicness of the sexual
activities and not the (sexual) body, or the Real of queer
subjectivities. Queer sex and sexuality in Another Gay Movie
exists not as a (re)presentation of the Real of queer subjectivities
but as a (queer) spectacle - the primary function of which is to
titillate and (potentially) aggravate audience reception.
<33> The confluence of (queer) sexuality and
publicness continues throughout Another Gay Movie. Each moment of queer
sexuality and sexual acts that are visually represented are publicly
framed. When Andy is masturbating and using household items as sex toys
his parents walk in to discover what he is doing which instigates a
discussion of masturbation, anal sex and health. There is also the
scene where Muffler and Andy simulate sex in the midst of a party
(Muffler stands in for Mr. Puckov), and again, while playing croquet at
(presumably) a country club, Beau rubs himself into Jared in direct
sight of several people. Jared and Beau's first attempt at
intercourse occurs in Beau's convertible while the top is down. When
Griff and Jared finally consummate their love, they do so outside by
pool light, even waking up naked in the morning and embracing each
other outdoors. Though publicly framing queer sexuality has significant
potential to reinscribe the individual queer collective with the Real
of queer subjectivities, these scenes place publicness, not queer
sexual subjectivity, as the object of the gaze. Employing generic
conventions of the teen sex comedy genre, this film utilizes sex and
sexuality as a means to disturb viewers' perceptions of normative
public/private binary frameworks: not as a means of subjectifying the
individual queer collective but as a means of objectifying (queer)
bodies and boundaries.
<34> Publicness of the Real of queer
subjectivities is central to the acquisition of agency within dominant,
heterocentric discursive formations: however, the Real of queer
subjectivities needs to be predominant while notions of publicness need
to remain subordinate to the primacy of the Real. As Rich Cante and
Angelo Restivo note, the visualization of queer sexual acts "brings
to the fore the crucial role that gay porn could suddenly play in
liberation politics, as newly activist historical subjects began to
transform themselves, the spaces of their lives, and their imagined
pasts and futures relative to the (new) horizons of such politics"
(144). Visualizations of queer sexualities and sexual practices, in the
act of transgressing normative and acceptable codes of
(re)presentation, can refigure socio-political positioning of queer
subjects outside dominant heterocentric discourses of identity
performance and move her/him towards a queer-centred mode of
(re)presentation, provided these (re)presentations fully articulate the
Real of queer subjectivities. Seeing our bodies engaging in activities
we engage in/fantasize about has a liberatory effect that is
antithetical to discourses of the closet in that all notions of shame
and lack that are inscribed in the queer body in/through the closet are
removed through the complete articulation of the Real of our individual
collective subjectivities.
<35> What is at stake in the public
(re)presentation of queer sexual activities "is precisely one's
position within the greater socius . . ." (Cante and Restivo 162).
The Brechtian motion of moving the viewer from mode of passive
observation to critical analysis makes evident the silencing and
delegitimizing narratives of the closet as the primary mode of queer
self-governmentality by articulating what is lacking in those
de-sexualized narrativizations yet always already present in the Real
of queer subjectivities. Yet, "the 'real' Real is both beyond and
behind Imaginary perception and Symbolic description...The Real,
therefore, is that before which the Imaginary falters, and over which
the Symbolic stumbles" (Ragland-Sullivan 188). Cinema, then, as a
medium reliant on the Imaginary and the Symbolic, lacks the capacity to
fully articulate the Real: the structure itself exists as a missed
encounter with the Real never fully imbricating the viewer with the
subjective realities of the on screen images.
<36> Irregardless, as Walters notes, "visibility
is, of course, necessary for equality. It is part of the
trajectory of any movement for inclusion and social change. We come to
know ourselves and to be known by others though the images and stories
of popular culture" (13). For us, as queer subjects, to participate
fully and equally within dominant discourses we need to know ourselves
and to express ourselves. To do so requires an acknowledgement and
(re)presentation of our sexual subjectivities, no more and no less than
hetero-sexual practices are (re)presented in mainstream cinema.
<37> Though it is true that the objects of discourse in Another Gay Movie are queer subjects, queer subjectivities are never fully realized on screen; they remain relegated to the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Both structurally and discursively, Another Gay Movie, and other "queer" films that explicitly sexualize queer subjects, represent a missed encounter with the Real. These films fail to articulate the primacy and centrality of queer subjectivities in any totality or complexity. Though the queer body in the act of being sexual is foregrounded in Another Gay Movie, the queer (sexual) body, the Real of queer subjectivities, continues to be disavowed as the locus of difference between queer and heterosexual subjects. In addition to this obfuscation of the body as the central meaning-making structure for queer subjectivities, these films employ distinctly hetero-linguistic generic conventions/structures and heterocentric Imaginary and Symbolic structures. How then can we expect to witness and tell our stories when the linguistic structures through which they are told are largely foreign to us. Dominant discourses of privilege and personhood have proven to be heterocentric and exclusionary and are entirely inadequate to (re)present the Real of queer subjectivities and as such, to allow the formation of any distinct genre of queer films.
Conclusions
<38> Seventeen years after B. Ruby Rich
proclaimed the social and political potential for NQC, we see the
devastating effects of internalized homophobia in the propagation of
the closet as the defining structure of queer identity performances.
What had once shown such potential to transgress normative
(re)presentational practices of queer subjectivities only recoded queer
bodies in an attempt to acquire social and political agency within
dominant discourses of privilege and personhood. Where NQC attempted to
break free from this narrative of legitimation by heterosexual cultural
formations, queer cinema became involved in a project of "sameness"
to heterosexual culture in an attempt to gain equality within dominant
discursive formations.
<39> The closet is a queer cultural construction
and expression of our own homophobia rooted in heterocentric and
heterosexist modes of (re)presentation that prescribe and proscribe
normative codes of identity performance (Ouellette). Though this
normativization of queer subjects (in relation to hetero-sexualities)
is believed to promote equality between heterosexual and queer
subjects, it only serves to infantilize our subject positioning and
remove queer agency within dominant culture. To remove our sexuality
and expressions/explorations of our sexuality is to visually and
figuratively castrate our individual collective subjectivities. Our own
willful imbrication with these structures of disenfranchisement cannot
lead to any semblance of socio-political autonomy or authority but to a
continued subjugation to the heterosexual majority and their
ideologically constructed narrativizations of queer life.
<40> As Lacan notes in Écrits,
"It is the world of words that creates the world of things - the
things originally confused in the hic et nunc of the all in the process
of coming-into-being - by giving its concrete being to their essence,
and its ubiquity to what has always been" (65). Rather than employing
a queer Imaginary and Symbolic order, queer films reorganize
heterosexual Imaginary and Symbolic structures to imply queerness
positioning "queer" cinema in one of two modalities: abject denial
of the Real of queer subjectivities through the de-sexualization of
queer subjects, or, metonymic (re)presentations of queer subjectivities
that focus on the publicness of queer sexualities and sexual
expressions; thereby enacting a missed encounter with the Real of queer
subjectivities. The lack of expressed sexual subjectivity for queer
people in queer films is a direct reflection on our own lacking of
subjectivity and agency constructed in the Real of our everyday
existences.
<41> Though the overt sexualization of the queer
subject has significantly advanced notions of visibility and perhaps
even reclaimed some modicum of agency denied queer subjects in film
post NQC, there remains a fundamental frustration of this process of
re-inscription and re-introduction of queer subjects into the public
sphere due primarily in part to the limitations of the film medium
itself and of the limitations we as queer subjects impose on the
medium. The frustration, for me, is that the Real of queer
subjectivities appears, at this point at least, vacant and nigh a
virtual (in both senses of the term) impossibility (Babich 56). As long
as queer film makers continue to frame their films using
heteronormative conventions of subjectivity and genre and
obfuscate/displace the Real of queer subjectivities no semblance of a
distinct genre of queer films can exist. At present, "queerness" in
film is more a taxonomic signifier denoting Symbolic (re)presentative
practices than an ontological formation of distinct generic structures
that image and imagine queer subjectivities.
<42> As Michael Warner argues in The
Trouble With Normal, "[a]utonomy requires more than civil
liberty; it requires the circulation and accessibility of sexual
knowledge, along with the public elaboration of a social word that can
make less alienated relations possible" (171). We need to be seen for
who and what we are if we are to expect and hope for equality within
dominant discourses. The articulation of the Real of queer
subjectivities has a dual purpose distancing the viewer (heterosexual
and queer), allowing for a critical engagement with normative
(re)presentational strategies of queer subjectivities, while
simultaneously allowing us as queer viewers to see possibilities for
public (re)presentations of non-heterocentric queer identity
performances.
<43> 29th and Gay and Mambo
Italiano exemplify the normativizing project of queer cinema
in the 90s and continuing on through the present. Their use of generic
conventions that disavow queer sexualities and sexual activities is an
overt expression of the homophobia internalized by queer communities,
representing the heterocentric governmentality of queer subjects and
their attempt to demonstrate how we as queer subjects are "just
like" heterosexual subjects. These conventions are problematic for
queer autonomy and agency in that they position the queer subject as
always already lacking those qualifiers that legitimate heterosexual
authority, namely an engagement in hetero-sexual practices. Another Gay
Movie, one film that explicitly images/imagines queer sexuality and
sexual activities, approaches the potential that public visualizations
of queer sexual activities contain. Portraying naked bodies in love, in
lust, making love, having sex, articulating the Real of queer
subjectivities, critically interrogates and deconstructs the limiting
narrative structure of the closet and repositions queer subjects
outside hegemonic heterosexual discourses of identity and
hetero-dominated relations of power.
<44> We, as queer subjects, cultural critics and
queer cultural producers, need to continue to refashion and
re-sexualize queer bodies in public performance and to continue an
exploration of queer subjectivities not formed in relation to the
heterosexual hegemony. Too often we are enculturated into queer
communities from a position of victimhood. Though there is no doubt
that we have been persecuted, victimized, abused and degraded by
dominant (heterosexual) cultural formations, our histories of activism
and resistance have been too limited in their scope. In rallying
against violence perpetrated on queer communities we have neglected to
examine violence perpetrated in and by queer communities.
<45> Judith Butler and Michel Foucault have paved the way for our understanding of how and why (queer) identities are mediated (Butler 2006, Foucault 1990). However, both interrogate queer subjectivities in relation to hegemonic heterosexual cultures. There is a fundamental element of queer subjects' control and ownership over the discourses that prescribe and proscribe identity performance that is lacking in both Foucault and Butler's analyses. It is only in examining Foucault's notions of governmentality in conjunction with Sedgwick's epistemology of the closet that we can begin to understand the scope of our own culpability, our continued subjugation to heterocentric discourses of privilege and personhood, as well as queer (re)presentational practices that fail to (re)present the Real of queer subjectivities.
Notes
[1] The term "individual collective" refers to the imbrication of the individual with the collective communities to which they identify. As the queer self is never autonomous or independent from queer historiography but rather an individual subsumed within the collective histories of queer communities and subjectivities. [^]
Works Cited
29th and Gay. Dir. Carrie Preston. Perf.
James Vasquez, Nicole Marcks, Daive McBean, and Mike Doyle. TLA
Releasing, 2005.
Another Gay Movie. Dir. Todd Stephens.
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Morris. TLA Releasing, 2006.
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Warner, Michael. The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New Your, NY: The Free Press, 1999.
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