Queer Cinemas: New Queer Cinemas by Ruby Rich School Girls, Vampires and Gay Cow Boys by Barbara Mennel
Queer Cinemas: New Queer Cinemas by Ruby Rich School Girls, Vampires and Gay Cow Boys by Barbara Mennel
Queer Cinemas: New Queer Cinemas by Ruby Rich School Girls, Vampires and Gay Cow Boys by Barbara Mennel
From 2010s a number of LGBT filmmaker identified a newer trend in LGBT filmmaking, in which the influence
of New Queer Cinema is evolving toward more universal audience appeal.
Emergence of LGBT-themed mainstream films such as ‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘Milk’, and ‘The Kids Are All
Right’ is identified as a key moment in the evolution of the genre.
The French film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival
BARBARA MENNEL
Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys illustrates queer cinematic aesthetics by highlighting key films that
emerged at historical turning points throughout the twentieth century.
Barbara Mennel traces the representation of gays and lesbians from the sexual liberation movements
She explains early tropes of queerness, such as the boarding school or the vampire, and describes the development
of camp from 1950s Hollywood to underground art of the late 1960s in New York City.
Mennel concludes with an exploration of the contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian films and global
queer cinema.
Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires and Gay Cowboys also contributes to an academic discussion about queer
subversion of mainstream film.
Schoolgirls, vampires, and gay cowboys
Schoolgirls, vampires and gay cowboys are the heroes of this book.
The former – schoolgirls and vampires – emerged in German films as ciphers of queer desire at the beginning of
the twentieth century, while the latter – Ang Lee’s gay cowboys – queer the most manly of men and symbolise the
presence of gays and lesbians in contemporary Hollywood.
SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES, AND GAY COWBOYS
When in 1934 an agreement among the major studios in Hollywood to a system of self-censorship – the
production code – went into effect, it formalised the verdict that homosexuality could not be represented in acts or
words on the screen.
Also named the Hays Code after its creator Will H. Hays, the production code was intended to uphold moral
standards, and was most strictly enforced under helm of Joseph I. Breen from 1934 to 1954.
Throughout the 1950s filmmakers began contesting it, so that it weakened during the 1960s and was abandoned in
1968. The production code circumscribed notions of decency
It portrays the two dominant developments of contemporary queer cinema: one, mainstreaming, particularly in the
US, and two, the global proliferation of queer films.
The first and more extensive section describes the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian cinema in films that address
a general audience and the use of conventional genres for films geared at gays and lesbians.
It surveys the international proliferation of queer cinema during the last decade in a cursory overview of queer
international cinema and few select readings of films to illustrate transnational queer cinema’s simultaneous
engagement with national film traditions.
SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES, AND GAY COWBOYS
From the late twentieth century into the twenty-first, queer visual representation proliferated in unprecedented
ways in film, but also on television, and in emerging new media.
Queer film increasingly includes cross-dressing, transgender, transsexual and intersex subjects as characters that
determine narratives in independent and mainstream films, and this, in a global queer context.
The twin development of new media, often seen as one of the major factors in globalisation, and the
deconstruction of gender, is not coincidental, as digital networks allow both for disembodiment and alternative
forms of embodiment in cyberspace. With the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian figures.
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