Introduction: Queer, World, Cinema

The introduction addresses the place of queer cinema in the world; what might the world mean to queers, and what does queer cinema mean for the world? Focusing on the intersection of queer politics and world cinema, it asks both how queer films construct ways of being in the world and what is the political value of the worlds that queer cinema creates. Engaging medium specificity, film culture, geopolitics and the fault lines of identity politics, this chapter introduces the concept of queer worlding. Worlding necessarily includes the many processes and concepts that have gained traction in thinking about the planet’s cultures: globalization, transnational identification, diaspora, postcolonialism, internationalism, ecology, and cosmopolitanism. This chapter argues that queer cinema elaborates new accounts of the world, offering alternatives to embedded capitalist, national, hetero- and homo-normative maps, revising the flows and politics of world cinema, and forging dissident scales of affiliation, affection, affect, and form.