Nonmaterial Overelaboration: Gender, Casting, and Camouflaged Labor in Pat Rocco's Promotional Travelogue

Abstract

Pat Rocco's ONE Adventure, a promotional film for a gay men's nonprofit's tourism subsidiary, documented early 1970s US-Europe homophile coalitions but also incorporated softcore sequences for commercial appeal to a gay male market. Yet Rocco's disavowal of pornography generally — and specifically in the case of ONE Adventure — elides the precarious labor that undergirded his films’ productions. This article proposes that gay media history needs to critically confront nonmaterial overelaboration — the covering over of the material conditions of media production — in media products, their paratexts, and historiography itself. It is necessary for gay media history to take up feminist production history methods to interrogate this elision of labor enacted by cultural history approaches to Pat Rocco's filmmaking. More broadly, the article's concept of nonmaterial overelaboration provides a critical avenue for focalizing labor in other areas of media history.