Queer Media History – W24

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This class explores the means by which queer filmmakers have used the work of others to reimagine their own individual and collective pasts, presents, and future possibilities. We will examine practices that often combine discourses of visibility and resistance to produce LGBTQIA+ narratives that co-opt existing tropes and familiar images to create the potential for new understandings, experiences, and political activism. These narratives intersect fiction and nonfiction – using the fabricated to reflect upon and challenge constructs of conventional truths and normative identities, as commentaries upon ideas of self-determination and self-identification. In screening a wide variety of LGBTQ+ personal adaptations and referential works, including experimental and experiential media, essay films and autoethnographies, diaries and mock-u-dramas, we will nuance our appreciation of the process of reception and perception of filmic texts. Drawing from the meaning of the word “adaptation” itself, which implies fitting a text for “new use,” these works reveal how the self is informed by media consumption. Further understanding adaptation and related uses of referential media, as not only a reworking of an original text but part of a larger dialogic conversation, also is a key element of this course.