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.

1 New Queer Cinema figures
2 Notes
3 Further Reference
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] New Queer Cinema figures

[edit] Directors

Gus Van Sant: Mala Noche, My Own Private Idaho, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Todd Haynes: Poison, Safe, Dottie Gets Spanked, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven
Jennie Livingston: Paris is Burning
Christopher Munch: The Hours and Times
John Cameron Mitchell: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus
Gregg Araki: The Living End, The Doom Generation, Mysterious Skin
Tom Kalin: Swoon
Rose Troche: Go Fish
Isaac Julien: Young Soul Rebels
Alex Sichel: All Over Me
Lizzie Borden: Born in Flames, Working Girls
Derek Jarman: Edward II, Caravaggio, The Garden, Sebastiane
Maria Maggenti: The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love
Bruce LaBruce: No Skin Off My Ass (although this might properly be classified as Queercore)

[edit] Producers

Christine Vachon: Poison and Swoon
Andrea Sperling: The Hours and Times and The Doom Generation

[edit] Actors

Craig Gilmore: The Living End (film)

[edit] Notes

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

[edit] Further Reference

B. Ruby Rich “New Queer Cinema”: Sight & Sound, Volume 2, Issue 5 (September 1992)
B. Ruby Rich “Queer and present danger”: Sight & Sound, Volume 10, Issue 3 (March 2000): http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/80/
Joseph Bristow: Sexuality (1997) ISBN 0-415-08494-6
Cante, Richard C. (March 2008). Gay Men and the Forms of Contemporary US Culture. London: Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 0 7546 7230 1.
Derek Jarman: Queer Edward II (1991) ISBN 0-85170-316-X
Martin Frey. Derek Jarman - Bewegte Bilder eines Malers. BoD 2008, ISBN 978-3-8370-1217-0
Mark Simpson (journalist) (ed.): Anti-Gay (1996) ISBN 0-304-33144-9
Tamsin Spargo: Foucault and Queer theory (1999) ISBN 1-84046-092-X
Colin Spencer: Homosexuality: A History (1995) ISBN 1-85702-447-8
Richard Dyer: The Culture of Queers (2002). ISBN 0-415-22376-8