{"title":"The Personal Is Archival","authors":"Laura Stamm","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 4 investigates Barbara Hammer’s creation and use of queer archives to tell stories—via particular lesbians—of lesbian cultures past. The chapter’s turn to a lesbian filmmaker is an assertion that the preservationist impulse that accompanied much AIDS activism was genealogically connected to and politically aligned with feminist historiographical practice and body politics. The queer body politics of the AIDS crisis, politics rooted in the care of queer bodies, draws from the feminist politics and cinema originating in second-wave feminism. The chapter argues, then, that the lesbian body politics established in Hammer’s cinema, beginning in the 1970s, informed queer filmmakers’ activist approach to filmmaking during the AIDS crisis. Through readings of Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), Welcome to This House (2015), and Lover/Other (2006), this chapter argues that a distinctly lesbian-feminist aesthetic does not exist independently of a distinctly queer one.","PeriodicalId":363482,"journal":{"name":"The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115210538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Suspended in History","authors":"Laura Stamm","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores cinema as a place to learn about one’s origins and make sense of one’s position in the world; it opens up an existential problematic by reorienting queer understandings of kinship and genealogy. The past becomes a place for identification and the biopic its cinematic form. Queer filmmakers’ returns to the past are also conditioned by longings for community and lineage. Matthew Mishory’s Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman (2009) conditions this chapter’s re-reading of Derek Jarman’s films as taking part in a project of queer genealogy. Mishory, Jarman, and Ken Russell form a lineage of queer filmmakers who look to queers of the past to reimagine that past differently, to re-present it queerly.","PeriodicalId":363482,"journal":{"name":"The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era","volume":"159 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127165470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Proximal Relations in the Cinema of Tom Kalin","authors":"Laura Stamm","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"The case studies of Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) and Savage Grace (2007) are the basis of Chapter 2’s return to cinema’s biomedical history, as well as to psychoanalytic models of suturing, to excavate queer filmmakers’ disruption of normative models of spectatorship. By examining the modes of looking and investigating already established by the studio-era scientist biopics, this second chapter argues that queer filmmakers returned to this observational mode in the midst of a health crisis. Kalin’s films are concerned with the biopic’s premise of proximity, being close to a historically or socially significant individual, but in such a way that puts forth alternative modes of vision and inspection. The biopic’s promise of closeness to an individual follows the Hollywood cinema’s conventions of cinematic suturing; the spectators identify with the narration of the biopic’s subject and locate themselves in the depicted cinematic world.","PeriodicalId":363482,"journal":{"name":"The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115878281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reimagining the Face of HIV/AIDS","authors":"Laura Stamm","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 5 features a discussion of the queer biopic’s relationship to PWA photography and media representation, looking finally to contemporary media practices to reflect upon the current AIDS media landscape. The queer biopic does not function outside of other modes of photography and video; instead, questions of portraiture are foundational to any understanding of the biopic form. The chapter moves through the history of PWA photography, providing readings of photography by Therese Frare, Nicholas Nixon, David Wojnarowicz, and Nan Goldin. The chapter’s turn to contemporary HIV + multimedia artist Kia LaBeija examines the legacies of black queer performance that emerge in her video and photographic work.","PeriodicalId":363482,"journal":{"name":"The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116145855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Desire to See and Be Seen","authors":"Laura Stamm","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 1 interrogates Bruce LaBruce’s, Todd Haynes’s, and John Greyson’s respective approaches to community and belonging in the midst of the pandemic. By turning to the biopic genre, these filmmakers sought to challenge how dominant culture sees and represents pathologized bodies. Queer filmmakers’ use of the biopic draws on the genre’s history of creating an imagined community, national and otherwise, to represent alternative social relations constructed in the image of different (queer) individuals. Moreover, the chapter gives sustained consideration to films like Zero Patience (Greyson, 1993) to explore constructions of queer (or gay and lesbian) community—who they include, who they exclude, what they produce, and how they affect queer embodiment.","PeriodicalId":363482,"journal":{"name":"The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era","volume":"63 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128200563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusion: Speculative Futures","authors":"Laura Stamm","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197604038.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The book’s conclusion, “Speculative Futures,” revalues the biopic’s importance for contemporary queer and trans cinema. It, moreover, argues that the biopic genre provides a form for telling the stories of lives excluded from dominant history. Readings of Happy Birthday, Marsha! (Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel, 2018) and Salacia (Tourmaline, 2019) illustrate the biopic’s ability to construct speculative personal histories. Moreover, such speculative constructions provide depictions of queer and trans lives where adequate archival sources do not exist. While this book begins at the AIDS crisis, it ends by recognizing that we still live in the AIDS era and queer and transfilmmakers continue to transform the biopic.","PeriodicalId":363482,"journal":{"name":"The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era","volume":"46 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123261122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}