Speaking Otherwise: Allegory, Narrative, and Queer Public Space Available to Purchase

This chapter focuses on narrative and specifically deploys allegory as a way to reimagine what it means to speak in the world. Locating queer bodies at the heart of some canonical theories of national allegory, it argues that queerness is a constitutive part of imagining the world and that allegory is a central modality of its narration. It finds allegory at work across geographically disparate sites of narrative cinema, from art cinema classics to crucial postcolonial texts, and including African, Southeast Asian, and Japanese cinemas. It reads allegory in contestations of tradition and modernity across experimental cinema, video art, BDSM aesthetics, and queer folktales. Across these heterogeneous film texts, the chapter proposes allegory as a mode of queer worlding that intersects a politics of erasure with insistent utopian imaginaries that reframe the space of the public.