Karl Schoonover is Associate Professor and Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick and the author of
Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King's College London and the author of
Karl Schoonover is Associate Professor and Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick and the author of
Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King's College London and the author of
Registers of Belonging: Queer Worldly Affects Available to Purchase
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Published:November 2016
This chapter turns to register, positing that to capture queer modes of belonging in the world, queer cinema deploys cinematic tone, feeling, and affect in radical ways. This chapter brings together films with apparently mismatched registers of tone and cultural hierarchy, finding resonance across disparate genres and modes of filmmaking. It begins with melodrama, a register that is already overdetermined as queer. The audiovisual regime of emotion and surface that characterizes melodrama has been central to queer cultural theories, and it considers the global implications of melodrama’s political affects in Indian and Bangladeshi gay and transgender films. It elaborates registers of affiliation and proximity and queer experiences of sociality and community. It analyzes the queer historical drama and the politics of touch and the haptic in activist documentary, and it considers space and nature as vectors of queer intimacy, rethinking the pastoral and animality.
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