Queer Film and Media Pedagogy

Bronski, Michael.Ginsberg, Terri.Grundmann, Roy, 1963-Keeling, Kara, 1971-

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number1, 2006, pp. 117-134 (Article)

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M o v i n g I m a g e R e v i e w

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY

Michael Bronski, Terri Ginsberg, Roy Grundmann, Kara Keeling, Liora Moriel, Yasmin Nair, and Kirsten Moana Thompson

Introduction

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (GLBTQ) scholars today face

an unprecedented travesty of their long-standing struggles for liberation and

equality both in academe and throughout the public sphere. Notwithstanding

increased positive GLBTQ representation in films and on television, anti-GLBTQ

violence and disempowering legislative initiatives evidence a pervasive chipping

away at hard-won pro-GLBTQ battles by neoconservative and neoliberal forces,

which have insinuated themselves through the back door. The acuteness of these

troubling conditions prompts urgent questions among GLBTQ film and media

scholars, not least because their primary areas of study lie at the center of battles

for control of public knowledge production about the general subject. These battles

are now producing some of the most egregious consolidations of media industrial

power in history: recalling Ben H. Bagdikian, the communications industry has

become a “media monopoly” that works to sustain multinational rivalry over the

world’s dwindling natural resources and increasingly disenfranchised labor force,

dumb down the populace, politically isolate demographic regions, and suppress

speech and free dissent, especially regarding strategies of resistance, wherever

they may flourish.1

The following roundtable on queer film and media pedagogy is intended to

GLQ 12:1

pp. 117–134

Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press

118 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

open space for long-overdue, much-needed dialogue and debate over these issues

and the questions to which they allude, and in turn to supply reasons for GLBTQ

academics’ refusal to comply with institutional pressures on them to assimilate,

return to ghetto culture and the closet, or keep silent about their difficult histories

and efforts so as to prop up an ostensible GLBTQ “market.” Apparent in every-

thing from subway ads to television shows, this viable sense of “queer” is often

conceptually so alienated from the real diversity of GLBTQ communities that its

cultural products risk serving as mere tokens for the vicarious entertainment of

majority straights — who are nonetheless ideologically positioned in this way to

identify “queerly” — and for exploitation by the media industry and its executives,

most of whom are likewise far removed from everyday GLBTQ life.

As the United States continues to rationalize the violent subjugation of

global peoples on the assumed bases of “women’s liberation” (Afghanistan, Iran),

“world pride” (Palestine/Israel), and “humanitarian intervention” (Iraq, Lebanon,

Syria), five GLBTQ scholars, representing a progressive spectrum of national,

class, gender, sexual, racial, generational, and disciplinary positions, have much

to say about their work as film and media pedagogues. These scholars have been

asked to answer questions about teaching GLBTQ film and media in the con-

text of the institutional and political struggles undertaken since the early 1990s.

For example, they consider if, in light of current social conditions, the concept of

sex/gender “identity” still plays a significant and useful role in the organization

and implementation of their GLBTQ film and media syllabi. They also discuss

how GLBTQ film and media pedagogues now structure the inclusion of GLBTQ

material into non-GLBTQ-specific courses. What discourses, theories, and cine-

matic practices do the discussants think characterize this shift toward inclusion, if

indeed it has taken place, and how do they think such practices relate to contem-

porary conditions and events? What course materials have the discussants gener-

ally employed to exemplify, perform, and critique this apparent curricular shift?

Do they think that the recent academic restructuring around interdisciplinarity,

which in film studies is oriented overwhelmingly toward media studies and techno-

scientific training and development (e.g., “the incursion of ‘the digital’ into film,”

as one discussant puts it), has affected what many scholars perceive as a shift

away from “identity”-based analysis to more far-reaching, or perhaps much nar-

rower, approaches? Has the interdisciplinary turn effected curricular and institu-

tional resituations of the GLBTQ film and media courses that the discussants have

planned and taught in recent years? Do they see “queer” as now serving ideologi-

cal functions vis-à-vis interdisciplinarity and its socioeconomic entailments, and

what do they think constitutes a critical pedagogical engagement with this devel-

118 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY 119

opment? Do their integrations of “queer” into syllabi reflect any such engagement,

and what classroom experiences have in turn been enabled? Put another way, do

the discussants find it still, or perhaps especially, useful to utilize pedagogical

techniques that signify “queerness” or that structurally overdetermine their syl-

labi as “queer”? What might those techniques be, and what, from the discussants’

respective disciplinary orientations, have been their educational and intellectual

effects? How in this regard do the discussants see the discourses and theories that

make up a historically multidisciplinary GLBTQ film studies functioning in their

pedagogical approaches to queer film and media? Has film studies undergone a

paradigm shift, and if so, what critical and cinematic modalities can be expected

to frame and perhaps dominate future queer film and media studies? In view of

recent social, institutional, political-economic, and epistemological changes, that

is, what do the discussants believe now makes for a meaningful and effective queer

film and media pedagogy?

All of the roundtable participants believe that GLBTQ film and media

studies has changed since the early 1990s, but their explanations vary. Their con-

cerns include queer film and media studies’ unstable opening onto the non- and

postidentitarian discourses enabled by critiques of racist assumptions and exclu-

sions associated with prior “gay and lesbian” formations. Many of the discussants

see a need for the popular “queer” tendency toward mainstreaming and recloseting

to be critiqued in light of feminism and anticapitalist analyses of U.S. global hege-

mony. Several also grapple with the elision of formalist film and media theory, an

elision that some of them view as symptomatic of an antitheoretical turn away from

the analysis of film and media aesthetics associated with the avant-garde. Such a

turn, they believe, lends “queer” a cryptic quality that, ironically, reinforces aca-

demic elitism, political dogmatism, and social privilege.—Terri Ginsberg

Kirsten Moana Thompson: Inevitably, queer studies has changed since the early

1990s and has affected the teaching of queer film, in the same way that queer

emerged as a pedagogically and conceptually flexible term to signal a shift beyond

GLBT representation to broader theoretical explorations of sexual practices, identi-

fications, and representations that were not restricted to questions of identity, com-

munitarian politics, and/or affiliations. This shift enabled the field to engage ques-

tions of deviancy, alterity, pathology, and perversity and, in general, to consider

the instability of categories, whether of anatomical sex, gender, or sexual desire,

and the lack of congruence among these categories. Furthermore, while certain

genres in GLBTQ film persist as die-hards (the coming-out story, the subcultural-

practices documentary, the biopic), other films continue to complicate questions of

120 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

identity across race, gender, class, and sexuality boundaries. These films can be

taught as part of any film class, and I tend to teach more of this material “outside”

a traditional graduate seminar, with a specific focus on queer film and theory.

Roy Grundmann: I also think that the teaching of queer film has undergone sev-

eral shifts over the past fifteen years, and I see them as reflecting changes in the

contemporary film/media landscape and in the concept of “queer” itself. In 1990

I began to teach queer media by analyzing Hollywood homophobia. These days

my students pay less attention to movies. Their queer media diet focuses more

on Queer as Folk, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The L Word, Will and Grace,

and Six Feet Under. This change in viewing habits is not insignificant. It alerts us

to the importance of addressing television critically. These shows pretend to be

accurate reflections of queerness, when they are, first and foremost, reflections of

mainstream television’s values and politics of representation. TV promises to lend

us all a queer eye; however, here, as in black-family and single-women sitcoms

and countless other examples, TV is really a leveler of identity, not a diversi-

fier. Its putative queerness is always already the product of nonqueer interests.

But critically discussing television is only one aspect of queer media pedagogy.

It remains important to expose students consistently to alternative media. And

understanding these alternatives in turn requires understanding the evolution of

the concept of “queer.”

Kara Keeling: Each course I have developed that focuses on issues of sexuality

seeks to explore and interrogate the onscreen appearance of ostensibly lesbian,

gay, and transgender subjectivities while holding the category of “queer” open as

a dynamic, politically oriented site of inclusiveness and challenge to the smooth,

exclusionary production of normative sexualities. The way I develop syllabi in my

interdisciplinary area of media and cultural studies, for instance, is informed by

the publication of studies since 2000, such as those by David Eng and Roder-

ick A. Ferguson, that foreground the imbrications of the production of nonhet-

eronormative sexualities with the production of racialized subjects.2 Insofar as

it is increasingly accepted that conditions of oppression and exploitation that are

rooted in sexual difference and “sex/gender identity” cannot be thought of out-

side the context of their production in hierarchical systems of economic, racial,

and cultural differences, my syllabi seek to complicate students’ commonsensical

understandings of the production and circulation of “queer representations” in

visual media while prompting them to interrogate the ideological work that those

images nonetheless do in their circulation.

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY 121

Michael Bronski: I’m not sure that the elemental teaching of queer films has under-

gone a change so much as students’ backgrounds and expectations have shifted

dramatically. In my experience, students are now far less interested simply in dis-

cussions of “positive” and “negative” images and more concerned with surveying

“queer film” in broader social and political contexts, but through a “queer” lens.

This has been true when I have taught canonical GLBTQ films — The Killing of

Sister George, Cruising, and The Uninvited — and also films outside this canon,

as well as shows like Queer as Folk or The L Word. So it has been possible for me

to plan and promote more interesting discussions and to push the materials into

new arenas. I taught a film-based course in the spring of 2003 titled “Judaism,

Sexuality, and Queerness” — the films included The Dybbuk, Angels in America,

Capturing the Friedmans, Ali G., and Yidl mitn Fidl — and the students had little

trouble moving from close readings to sophisticated, theoretical discussions about

the interrelatedness of constructions of religion, desire, and identity.

Terri Ginsberg: That course was taught at an Ivy League school. What about less

prepared students in underfunded environments, where dumbing down is often

the rule and where progressive pedagogues face very different challenges when

trying to introduce sophisticated, theoretical, and socially transformative concepts

and discourses to young adults not descended primarily from the ruling and upper

middle classes?

Yasmin Nair: I began my foray into queer pedagogy, or teaching “queer,” in the

1990s in West Lafayette, Indiana. My colleagues and I found ourselves in a geo-

graphic and cultural space easily identifiable as antiqueer and racist, and that fact

lent a sense of insurgency to our collective work as teachers and scholars. Queer

theory may have been flourishing elsewhere in the academy, but in West Lafay-

ette teaching queer film and media seemed inherently subversive. So I eventually

relocated to Chicago and began to teach at a university often referred to as one of

the most diverse campuses in the country. Here I taught students from notoriously

underserved public schools that had barely taught them the basics of writing. Yet

these same students had been effectively schooled in the rhetoric and the ideology

of a respect for difference.3 Consequently, my students were not averse to queer

themes and texts. They scorned the homophobia of the nineteenth-century medical

texts that we read for a course on the construction of gender and sexuality. During

a visual culture course I showed clips from the gay porn star Ryan Idol’s oeuvre

with impunity (and a word of caution: they had the option of leaving the classroom

during the screening). They had been raised to believe that hating queers was

122 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

wrong; most of them had gay- or lesbian-identified friends and relatives; they knew

that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact.

Thompson: Well, with a sense in the late 1990s that the emergence of queer the-

ory as a subspecialty in the humanities had “peaked,” and with the increasing

normalization of queer representation on mainstream television and film (Will and

Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Girl), “queer” has joined the panoply of theo-

ries from race to class and gender that interrogate notions of identity, subjectivity,

desire, and so on.

Nair: Indeed. By the time I had relocated to Chicago, things had changed even

in small-town Indiana, with a new university president approving long-fought-for

changes like domestic partnership benefits and a commitment to racial, sexual,

and gender diversity. I’ve since realized that there never was, pedagogically speak-

ing, much difference between West Lafayette and Chicago. What I’d construed as

a yawning gap between the two has not shrunk so much as revealed itself to be a

mirage. Each place became more like the other, impelled toward a tolerance for

diversity of all kinds, even if at different speeds. Across campuses and the culture

at large, we are privy to an intense fetishization of difference and the proliferation

of a particular kind of identity politics: one divorced from any political under-

standing of the power relations that determine identities as such. My students

knew it was wrong, or at least unpopular, to hate people with AIDS. But they had

no cultural memory of the history of AIDS activism by groups like ACT UP and

had never seen the guerrilla media work of collectives like Deep Dish and Paper

Tiger Television. That’s no surprise, given that AIDS activism has been recast in

the form of expensive fund-raising dinners, events that are widely publicized but

make no demands for structural change in medical research and the pharmaceuti-

cal industry.

Liora Moriel: I know what you mean. When Angels in America is shown on HBO

with a cast of stars and wins awards, it is hard to believe that ACT UP has become

a welcome guest at the dinner table. What next? Will Tony Kushner receive a Ken-

nedy Center award from George W. Bush? The play won a Pulitzer Prize, among

many other awards, and is deservedly iconized and lionized. But how can a work

so critical of the mainstream be so embraced by it? Surely as teachers we must

present this question to our students and help them answer it in incisive ways.

Nair: To that end, I’m concerned less with whether or not I can engage in queer

pedagogy than with the conditions in which I’m able to do so.

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY 123

Bronski: What I have seen is that “queer film studies” has become “queerer” — that

is, open to a far wider, more subversive, and less stable range of investigative

methods and questions — as students have become less attached to discussing

film as an art or even a technique.

Thompson: Although technology as both medium and mode is increasingly a ped-

agogical means to explore the relationship among discourse, identity, and repre-

sentation with reference to the Internet, cell phones, instant messaging, cybersex,

video gaming, blogging, and so on. Likewise, recent research into turn-of-the-

century photographic archives calls into question received assumptions about fin

de siècle formations of the homosexual/heterosexual subject in sexology and medi-

cojuridical literature.4

Moriel: This is partly because cinema studies has changed with the advent of each

theory and theorist, and the past couple of decades have seen a proliferation of both.

There are more film classes and more venues for academic as well as independent

criticism than ever before. And the proliferation of blogs and e-journals is expand-

ing an already enlarged field. To my mind, this is a good thing, because queer criti-

cism has become not a niche genre but part of the conversation about the way that

film works as a cultural tool for both inclusion and suppression. It is important that

students, as well as the general public, become aware of these manipulations.

Grundmann: By the same token, the concept of “queer” has itself undergone

changes that reflect the evolving status of sex/gender “identity” and of North Ameri-

can identity politics under liberal pluralism. It is daunting enough to compress into

one syllabus the whole of gay and lesbian political and cultural history before one

even arrives at the term queer, that is, before the emergence of queer theory and

queer cultural pluralism in the 1990s. Not to mention the difficulty of adequately

addressing the current polarization between “gay” and “queer,” triggered by a queer

critique of the perceived political apathy of many postliberation gays and lesbians

and of the scandalizing support it receives from some neoliberal and conservative

politics. This gay-versus-queer debate has been prominent for some time, and the

rise of gay conservatism is, in fact, as embarrassing as it is worrisome. Yet despite

the political exigencies that have necessitated the queer disavowal of “gay,” this

disavowal is also sometimes marked by parochialism and dogmatism.

Nair: Just consider how “queer” on campuses has become both an object of con-

sumption and part of the institutional network of GLBTQ support offices. I don’t

deny the importance of student services for queers on campus, but I do wish to note

124 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

their insidious effects. They have resulted in a straightening and homogenizing of

“queer,” because their funding and sponsorship usually depend on their present-

ing acceptable faces of conformity, nonpromiscuous commitment, and bland cor-

porate identity. The changes we see are not just part of the cultural conservatism

and self-policing of queer communities. Since Columbine and 9/11 they are also

direct effects of the “war on terrorism.” Where, in this era of intense surveillance

and policing, are the public spaces, libraries, and bathrooms, where queers might

scope out their own?5 Where is the space for angry, subversive, radical, promiscu-

ous, nonhetero queers? Where, in the midst of a shift toward tolerance and under-

standing of the (only slightly different) queer body, is the possibility for a radical

queer pedagogy in film and media?

Thompson: As I see it, this “mainstreaming” of queer representation since the

early 1990s is actually one way into addressing theories about consumerism,

commodity fetishism, Marxism, semiotics, and so forth. Contemporary as well

as classical film theory and philosophy remain important pedagogical organiz-

ing discourses around which students explore representation, aesthetics, desire,

subjectivity, and other issues in my classes, and so feminism and psychoanalysis

remain key theoretical discourses in course readings. Similarly, recent work in

transnational diasporic studies usefully raises “queer” as one dimension of how

the global and the national are in contestation.6

Keeling: Indeed, a heightened critical awareness of “queer” as a marker of differ-

ence in disparate locations, coupled with the global availability of “queer films”

produced in sociocultural contexts different from those of the United States,

necessitates, it seems to me, the development of queer media pedagogies capable

of attending to the particularities of articulations of “queer” sexualities from dif-

ferent locations without imposing on them specifically U.S. notions of “lesbian

and gay” sociopolitical and cultural formations.7 For me, teaching queer film

and media today involves a willingness to be challenged by texts such as Deepa

Mehta’s 1996 film Fire and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s 1994

film Strawberry and Chocolate, both of which lend themselves to analysis from

within the discourses and theories elaborated to engage U.S. films while suggest-

ing that they are indifferent to those theories.

Grundmann: At the same time, we need to remember that in our legitimate and

necessary critiques of gay mainstreaming (epitomized by gay marriage), we some-

times become so judgmental and dogmatic that we run the risk of replicating the

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY 125

classic sectarian insularity of an orthodox vanguard that, in its attempt to edu-

cate “the masses,” condescends to them, judging their desires and ignoring their

needs — only to end up being widely ignored itself. In our justified outrage over the

homophobia and moral bigotry of George W. Bush and the religious and political

Right, we have sometimes managed to vilify some of our own sex practices, porn

productions (male and female), drug experiments, even circuit parties — in fact, we

have consistently championed queer cross-identification over desire, happy to imply

that, these days, simply being homosexual doesn’t cut it on the oppression scale.

After articulating our incisive critique of gay consumerism, we go right on to sal-

vage our favorite consumer items theoretically by queering them. In our ambitious

analyses of gay professionals selling out to corporate ideology, we tend to overlook

that every single one of us is subject to the supply and demand of the mercan-

tile, commerce-driven, quasi-corporate queer academy. (Our graduate students are

learning the ropes of narrating their own oppressed identities so as to bring them

to reification for institutional leverage — read: teaching positions, book contracts,

speakers’ fees, and, most important, academic fame!) In our understandable desire

to revivify revolutionary instances of our own history, we have found new move-

ments such as “gay shame,” but we have yet to prove the sustainability of this — or

any — political movement predominantly on the strength of a negative vector.

Keeling: In my “Special Topics in Media Studies” class titled “Race, Sexual-

ity, and Cinema,” an advanced undergraduate course I developed and taught for

the first time in fall 2004 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we

did in fact explore not only how normative heterosexualities have been produced

and deployed cinematically over time but also how the more recent production

of normative homosexualities extends the logics of normative sexuality in ways

that require a reframing of what constitutes “queer” sexualities, as well as the

rationale for that reframing. This is not to say that we did not attend to questions

surrounding “representations” of homosexuals and lesbians in film and the work

that those representations have done and continue to do, but we approached those

questions with different expectations about what our interrogations would yield.

We, for example, questioned rather than called for the drive toward greater queer

visibility, even as we remained aware that our ability to ask questions about the

drive toward greater visibility was possible only because some visibility has been

achieved, both onscreen and in academe.

Ginsberg: I recently taught an advanced freshman writing seminar at Dartmouth

College titled “Jewish Memoir and Biography in Film and Literature,” in which we

126 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

screened The Times of Harvey Milk and read Living My Life, the autobiography of

Emma Goldman.8 Whereas I am always keen to criticize dogmatism and hypocrisy

on the GLBTQ left, and while I strongly support and encourage autocritique, I

question how constructive it is for us progressive academic queers to spend inor-

dinate time and energy berating ourselves for our purported sectarian tendencies,

and subsequently censoring ourselves through a skillful deployment of dialectic,

when in fact the sectarianism in our midst is incredibly weakened and dysfunc-

tional compared to the subversive ideologies associated with groups like the Log

Cabin Republicans. The real GLBTQ dogmatism and hypocrisy do not hail from

some imagined plethora of gay sectarians infiltrating our ranks — a claim easily

interpretable as presumptuous and McCarthyist, especially when one considers

the relatively delimited condition of GLBTQ studies on campuses, such as many

in Florida, where sexual orientation is not a protected category either in the state

constitution or in union collective bargaining agreements. We should be directing

the better part of our vigilance at the neoliberal and conservative camps, which,

backed by tremendous political and financial power, together frame GLBTQ

problematics and promote public discourse and debates that have been working

effectively, almost insurmountably, to forward agendas ultimately deleterious to

GLBTQ people on a global scale. A case in point is Phyllis Chesler’s incendiary

presentation at the “Middle East and Academic Integrity on the American Cam-

pus” conference, which was convened on March 6, 2005, at Columbia University

in honor of the right-wing propaganda film Columbia Unbecoming and sponsored

by right-wing organizations such as Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the

David Project (the latter produced the film). Chesler, author of the 1972 feminist

classic Women and Madness,9 at once emphasized her historical feminism and

progay, antiracist politics and decried “multiculturalist” insistence on equality

for Palestinian women, in turn positioning herself and the audience as victims of

feminists, gays, and African Americans who would so much as question her views.

According to this self-proclaimed “progressive,” socially marginalized groups dis-

ingenuously exploit their struggles and disenfranchisement to wring undeserved

sympathy (read: “special rights”) from the U.S. mainstream.

Moriel: Listen, words like sex and gender and identity shift in the sands of science

and technology even as we study them, so I am not sure what impact these issues

will ultimately have. Things are changeable, and so are these supposedly discrete

categories. I think that our task as queer theorists and teachers is not to provide

firm answers to fluid questions. Interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary inquiries

are wonderful in that they do not allow us to brush one tooth, in Tom Robbins’s

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY 127

wonderful definition of specialization; they insist on a more holistic approach.10

Queer criticism and pedagogy are not separate from other disciplines, to my mind,

but are part of a range of intellectual inquiries that make us and our students

better, more caring, and more informed citizens. In this way, curiously, I am con-

servative even though my students frequently inform me that I am the most liberal

instructor they have ever had. For what is more important than to provide students

with the tools to cut to the heart of the matter (film, theory, information, politics,

self-awareness, global awareness, etc.), to equip them to survive, even thrive, in

a world in which a glut of visual images and information has made us numb and

overwhelmed?

Keeling: Along these lines, what can be perceived as a shift in film and media

studies away from identity-based politics and cultural analysis finds correlates both

in a broadly framed critique of “single-issue” (“identity-only”) politics articulated

from within the GLBTQ movements in the United States and in the elaboration

of rhetorical and organizing strategies designed to animate and advance that cri-

tique. At the same time, mainstream media, including film, increasingly traffic in

“lesbian and gay images” even as the incursion of “the digital” into film calls into

question formulations of film as a representational medium. Under pressure from

the digital, film studies has had to confront anew its complex and often contentious

relationships to other visual media and other media technologies. This confronta-

tion today provides queer film and media studies scholars with the opportunity to

reframe concerns about the power of media images, concerns that were previously

articulated in large part through the language of “stereotypes,” “positive” versus

“negative” images, “identity,” “difference,” “ideology,” and so on.

Bronski: What I have been working on in recent courses is bringing “queer theory”

to the material in a way that allows students to enjoy and work on decentering the

material and yet forces them to deal with the technical aspects of film as well as

its political and social content. In the mid-1990s my students had a more difficult

time with “queer”; these days they allow it to override most other aspects of analy-

sis. So while I am not sure that I would have taught this material differently ten

years ago, I am even less sure what “makes for a meaningful and effective queer

film and media pedagogy” today. I am interested in why students are now more

capable of sophisticated, theoretical discussions. I think that it is in large part

because, in this historical moment, they are more disengaged from an organized

GLBTQ movement and feel no allegiance to more traditional aspects of identity

politics. But, more important, my sense is that while students are far more media

128 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

savvy today than a decade ago, they are less interested in film per se. While they

are more likely to be able to “read” and respond to images and technique — an

ability that to a large degree reflects the infiltration of media studies even at the

high school level — they seem less concerned about analyzing film itself and more

concerned about the issues it raises. In this sense, it is easier to bring to the con-

versation a host of discourses (psychoanalysis being, in my classes, one of the most

productive) than it was before, but what has been lost is the emphasis on film.

Thompson: I teach film and/or queer theory in a small film program within a large

English department offering concentrations in film, creative writing, linguistics,

and other subjects. The students I teach are not necessarily film majors, or even

English majors; they can be communications majors (from the School of Perform-

ing Arts) or students from elsewhere in the College of Liberal Arts. So I tend to

incorporate more queer theory into my undergraduate lecture classes and graduate

seminars on film theory or contemporary theory, rather than in a specialty course.

The reasons for this are partly practical and strategic: certain theory classes are

prerequisites for graduate majors, and in them I can introduce many more stu-

dents to some queer theory than I can in the small specialty queer seminars. In

this regard, my pedagogical practice considers how “queer” is a broad rubric in

which to explore questions of knowledge, pleasure, desire, identity, and perfor-

mance across the traditional interdisciplinarity and theoretical heterogeneity of

English studies today. Just as the object of study in English is amorphous, always

evolving from literature to music videos to the Internet, so “queer” has been a

useful tool with which to move away from (nominal) specialty courses and on to

wider investigations of the public sphere, citizenship, the urban, the global, and so

forth. So my institutional context has already shaped the interdisciplinary aspects

of both the content of my courses, which include queer theory and queer film, and

the heterogeneous makeup of my student audiences.

Moriel: The bottom line for me is also to situate queer film and media criticism

squarely in the mix of academic approaches to the study of culture, sociology,

history, literature, linguistics, anthropology, criminal justice, psychology, even sci-

ence and math. (I have always been fascinated that some universities award an

MA in math while others award an MS.) Teachers of queer film and media studies

have a lot to offer.

Keeling: Well, yes. In the present milieu, a “queer film and media pedagogy”

is most effective when it situates itself vis-à-vis “queer” according to that term’s

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY 129

most expansive gestures toward the inclusion of various expressions and forms of

nonheteronormativity and challenges to compulsory heterosexuality. To the extent

that such a queer film and media pedagogy might intervene in the ways that stu-

dents themselves participate in the exclusionary, differentiating processes that

animate the market for gay and lesbian images (and, perhaps, in the ways that the

hard-won, tenuous, and still necessary logic that informs the institutionalization of

“queer film and media studies” in the academy mirrors those processes by isolat-

ing the study of “queer film and media” from other areas of investigation), it might

do so by informing the development of syllabi that enact the modes of inclusion

and critique promised in the development of the term queer.

Bronski: Indeed, a great deal of class interest and discussion has concerned the

queering of sex/gender roles in the past years, so much so that my syllabi that

work best are the ones that bring queer theory to non-GLBTQ movies. In one

class, “Beatniks, Hot Rods, and the Feminine Mystique: Sex and Gender in 1950s

Films,” students seemed solely interested in looking through a queer lens. While

this lens included, to varying degrees, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and (some-

times) Marxism, for the most part it excluded explicitly feminist theory (which the

students viewed as old-fashioned and often repressive) and certain aspects of “cul-

tural studies” that they thought was just so much “reading into” a movie.

Moriel: In fact, feminist discourse, specifically Laura Mulvey’s theorizing about

the male gaze, opened up the way for queer discourse, which asks other basic

questions: which films are made and which are not, which characters are valorized

and which marginalized, which themes are allowed and which are either silenced

or distorted, and so on.11

Bronski: Students in “Beatniks, Hot Rods, and the Feminine Mystique” were happy

to begin seeing All about Eve, Bell, Book, and Candle, and I Married a Monster

from Outer Space as “queer” and did highly productive work under that rubric.

My inclination is to say, however, that “queer theory” and “queer film studies”

has been a terrific pedagogical tool for getting students excited about analyzing

and exploring a wide range of themes in films, whether GLBTQ or non-GLBTQ,

but that the excitement it generates often comes at the expense of equally useful

modes of analysis.

Grundmann: Yet queer media are indispensable to such pedagogical undertak-

ings. They can amplify an insight that Michael Warner has in The Trouble with

130 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Normal — that every queer theory must reckon with gay history — to show that

“queer” and “gay” are historically intertwined concepts.12 Their linkage plays out

in numerous ways. For example, in a class in which I look at the history of gay and

lesbian avant-garde media, a crucial lesson that emerges is the imbrication — in-

distinguishably queer and gay — of aesthetics and politics. In fact, in many ways

aesthetic experimentation is in and of itself a political act: often it has helped

convey sexual and bodily desires — perhaps most important, the queer practice

of transforming one’s body and one’s desires into a work of art. In my position as

a queer media pedagogue, I am often faced with such issues as how our media

pedagogy might renew its commitment to the study of aesthetics without fostering

an apolitical aestheticism, and how we can invigorate our students’ understanding

and appreciation of all the radical aesthetic practices that run through our old

and new works of queer literature and media. I’m not saying that answers to these

complex questions are easily available. What emerges as we try to answer them,

however, is the necessity of our remembering our history and our achievements.

Moriel: In my own pedagogy I help students view cinema against the grain, ask-

ing other questions that cut to the core of whether what we see is a sleight of

hand — the manipulation of the eye to move in one direction while other events

or images are set in motion in another. For example, I once noticed that the nar-

rative of Bonnie and Clyde did not compute as a heterosexual love story, given

the way that the movie was marketed. Poking around as Vito Russo, my virtual

pedagogical mentor, would have done, I discovered why and wrote a queer reading

of the film for the Cambridge handbook.13 That the article appeared in a main-

stream textbook about the film shows how far we have come in mainstreaming the

marginal. Again, I think that this is a good thing so long as we keep the blade of

criticism honed.

Bronski: Yet insofar as students seem less interested in discussing film art or

technique, I’ve often found doing that frustrating. My students seem happy to

destabilize film and other media, but often not at all eager to analyze — to “read

into” — and certainly not with a “political” agenda. So, ironically, as much as I

am attached to “queering” the material, I’ve found myself slowly retreating from

that position — with both the GLBTQ material and the non-GLBTQ material —

because, rather than expand how we look at film, it has created a more narrow

view.

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY 131

Moriel: The problem, as I see it, is that in some ways queer criticism is becoming

just another approach to visual language, just another class on the syllabus, and

thus losing its importance as a cutting-edge tool for incisive analysis. If in the

rush to tenure and approval we reshape our quest and make do with secondary

survival maneuvers, the days of queer pedagogy are numbered. Ironically and

paradoxically, our success can become our demise if we fail to take care of our

core belief in the mutability and possibility of all things, ideas, approaches. If

we codify our theory and teaching, we too will go the way of New Criticism. To

keep our criticism, discipline, and theories fresh and relevant, we must constantly

evolve; we must continue to question our premises, update our syllabi, and renew

our thinking.

Nair: Another approach to these problems is to consider the materiality of queer

work outside the classroom. As someone who is also engaged in political activism,

I have no desire to fetishize the work I do outside the academy or to romanticize

it as more “authentic.” I do suggest, however, that we more consciously engage

nonnormative readings and practices of queer film and media practices. “Queer”

is increasingly read in terms of the inclusion of difference, but we ought instead

to grapple with the critical work of, for instance, antiwar and sex work activists,

who circulate the term differently — and aggressively and explosively — to ques-

tion structures of power.14

Grundmann: One might also speak historiographically here by addressing the rift

I mentioned between “gay” and “queer” that is reflected in, among other things,

the glaring gap between the gay past and the queer present. In my opinion, this

gap exists not simply because young queers seem to be the only ones who recog-

nize many of the political exigencies of our time but, importantly, because a sig-

nificant number of older queers — a whole generation of gay men — are no longer

around to provide historical continuity. I am not saying that this generation was

politicized down to its last member. What died with them, however, was a vast, and

vastly significant, set of practices and knowledges that constituted a radical socio-

sexual experiment whose political potential could inspire queer life today. One of

my most imperative tasks is thus to help compensate for this loss. For me, one of

queer pedagogy’s ongoing projects must be to retrieve what once was radical about

“gay” (before “gay” was hijacked by right-wingers and populists) and rearticulate

it for current queer politics. This politics must become more flexible if it wants to

intervene against neoliberalism’s reactionary nature while staying critically alert

132 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

to the contradictions of the liberal environment (of politics, culture, and especially

education) in which queerness itself moves.

Ginsberg: To my mind, these concerns are symptomatic of political tensions and

uncertainty over the future of GLBTQ film and media studies. Attacks on abortion

rights, family planning, sex education, and HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention,

as well as attempts to install narrowly conceived Judeo-Christian values as a basis

for legislative process and the conduct of everyday life (e.g., the Broadcast Decency

Enforcement Act of 2005), are hardly contradictory to their ostensible opposites in

film and media culture. To reinvoke the all-but-forgotten Michel Foucault, current

anti-GLBTQ initiatives are not a reactionary backlash enacted by persons resent-

ful of what corporate and mainstream media have falsely presented as rampant

GLBTQ sexual and economic “libertinism”; assaults on the advances that GLBTQ

people have achieved collectively in economic equality and civil rights miss the

overriding truth, elided by the media and many scholars, that most GLBTQ people

still struggle on a daily basis for that modicum of dignity and respect withheld

from them by a predominantly heteronormative society divided ideologically along

lines of race, gender, nationality, generation, creed, and class. One need only refer

to research on the increasingly marginalized status of lesbian professors to recog-

nize just how misplaced claims to the contrary are.15 As the recent spate of public

attacks on academic speech and free dissent, especially regarding U.S. and Israeli

policy in the Middle East, demonstrates,16 conditions are ripe for ever more chill-

ing, fear-inspiring campus atmospheres, which, to distract national attention from

the horrors of expanding U.S. militarism in the context of an attenuated global

economic crisis related to the continuing use of floating oil prices as a standard

of monetary value, threaten to reverse the modest advances made by GLBTQ dis-

course and activism, not to mention discourage GLBTQ hires, GLBTQ curriculum

development, and the publication of serious GLBTQ scholarship.

Thompson: The results of the 2004 national elections, in which eleven states,

including my own (Michigan), passed initiatives opposed to gay marriage and/or

partnership benefits, also attest to the continued vulnerability of gay citizens and

to the tenuous and indeed superficial dimensions of gay “mainstreaming.” That is,

if gay marriage is such a contentious and deeply threatening issue to conservative

Americans, then questions of citizenship (whether at the national or local level)

and public utterances such as “I am a gay American” possess renewed pedagogi-

cal significance for classroom reading and discussions.

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY 133

Nair: This brings me to another issue that has a bearing on queer pedagogy: the

university and its reliance on contingent and underpaid labor. An account of

queer pedagogy, especially in the already contentious and somewhat underfunded

world of academic film and media, is incomplete if it does not contend with the

forces that undermine the relevance of pedagogy itself. I am frustrated with queer

theory’s persistent blindness to the deep inequalities of labor that pervade the

very system that engendered queer theory and solidified its existence. As queer

theorists and teachers, we see ourselves as insurgents within the university simply

because we explicate — and take — positions on sex, gender, and sexuality. But

our work is devoid of radical potential if it does not recognize that the condi-

tions governing who gets to teach “queer” with more or less autonomy are utterly

overdetermined by a system that perceives graduate students and adjuncts as the

“waste product” of the university.17 We cannot congratulate ourselves for enabling

queer pedagogy without critically examining what else “queer” must mean in rela-

tion to sexual, economic, and political control and surveillance. We risk losing the

power to ask questions about power if we allow ourselves to be blinded by the love

and tolerance of others that are often signified by limited struggles for marriage

and related citizenship rights.

Notes

1. Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon, 2004).

2. David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2001); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a

Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

3. For a critique of the notion of diversity, especially in its structuring of higher educa-

tion, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Diversity’s False Solace,” New York Times, April 11,

2004.

4. See Dana Seitler, “Queer Physiognomies; or, How Many Ways Can We Do the History

of Sexuality?” Criticism 46 (2004): 71–102.

5. I thank Bill Dobbs for contributing this point. — YN

6. See Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public

Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

7. See the anthologies Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism,

ed. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York: New York Uni-

versity Press, 2002), and Queer Diasporas, ed. Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-

Eppler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

8. Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1970).

9. Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).

134 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

10. Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

11. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6 –

18.

12. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life

(New York: Free, 1999).

13. Liora Moriel, “Erasure and Taboo: A Queer Reading of Bonnie and Clyde,” in Arthur

Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” ed. Lester D. Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2000), 148 – 76.

14. See Mattilda/Matt Bernstein Sycamore, ed., That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for

Resisting Assimilation (New York: Soft Skull, 2005).

15. See Beth Mintz and Esther Rothblum, eds., Lesbians in Academia: Degrees of Free-

dom (New York: Routledge, 1997).

16. See Scott Sherman, “The Mideast Comes to Columbia,” Nation, March 16, 2005.

17. Marc Bousquet, “The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of

the Flexible,” Social Text, no. 70 (2002): 81–104.