Introduction.

Festivals, Uncut:
Queering Film Festival Studies,
Curating LGBTQ Film Festivals

‘Fearless, Shameless, Timeless.’1

This book is born out of a paradox: while scholars have increasingly le-
gitimated festivals as a semi-independent field of research within film
and media studies, critics and arts organizers have long questioned the
cultural relevancy of LGBTQ festivals. As early as 1982, Thomas Waugh
wondered why (and whether) a new gay and lesbian film festival should
be organized in Montreal.2 Similarly, B. Ruby Rich famously observed that
queer festivals have simultaneously been ‘outlasting their mandate and
invited to cease and desist’.3 In focusing on LGBTQ festivals’ conflicted
temporalities and historiography, this book examines the disciplinary
assumptions that structure festival studies: it questions the theoretical and
political narratives implied in current festival scholarship.
In particular, this book is concerned with festival studies’ quest for
legitimacy: as a relatively recent field of academic research, festival studies
has been burdened with justifying its object of research. Symptomatically,
most books and dissertations on the topic start with a numbered description
of the festival phenomenon. It is customary to highlight that thousands
and thousands of festivals are organized each year. 4 LGBTQ festivals are
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

1 Inside Out (Toronto, 1991-ongoing), 2011 tagline.

2 Waugh, ‘Pourquoi encore un festival de cinéma lesbien et gai?’.
3 Rich, ‘The New Homosexual Film Festivals’, 620.
4 While it is almost impossible to estimate the number of festivals being organized each
year, the festival submission platform Withoutabox claims it serves over 5,000 festivals. See:
Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 18n7. In France alone, between 350 and 600 festivals are alleged to
have been organized in 2006. See: Iordanova and Rhyne, Film Festival Yearbook I, 1; Taillibert,
Tribulations festivalières, 10.

Damiens, A., LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2020
doi 10.5117/9789463728409_intro

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 18  LGBTQ Film Festivals

not an exception: for instance, Ger Zielinski asserts that queer festivals
are ‘often second largest only to the IFF [International Film Festivals] in
their respective city’.5 Similarly, Skadi Loist argues that ‘the LGBT/Q film
festival scene has grown exponentially, covering most regions of the globe
with about 230 active events on the circuit today’.6 The tendency to rely on
statistics and to map out what has been coined as the festival circuit can
difficultly be avoided: it justifies the relevancy of festival scholarship and
is symptomatic of an academic climate in which scholars are constantly
asked to evaluate the social impact of their research. It does, however, encode
a set of assumptions about which festivals matter, take hard numbers as
self-evident, and foreclose an examination of what constitutes a festival.
Instead of participating in this collective effort to describe and justify the
festival phenomenon, this book is concerned with analyzing the effects of
festival studies’ theoretical and methodological frameworks – frameworks
that tacitly structure our scholarship but are never fully acknowledged.
To that end, it is guided by the belief that festival studies is currently at
an impasse: as a self-referential field, it not only constantly reproduces a
particular type of scholarship, but also drastically limits our understanding
of what festivals are and thus of what their uses can be within film studies.

Pre-screening: constituting festival studies

‘Where films come out.’7

Festival studies largely draws on the historical and theoretical framework

established by Marijke de Valck.8According to her, film festivals started out
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

as a European phenomenon: Venice (1932), Cannes (1946), and Berlin (1951)

5 Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’, 116. Scholars generally argue that around 280 yearly
events would be dedicated to the screening of queer cinema. They systematically reference
‘The Big Queer Film Festival List’ (http://www.queerfilmfestivals.org/). The number of LGBTQ
festivals being organized each year is probably underestimated: as this book argues, scholars
often rely on a strict definition of what a festival is, thereby ignoring events which are ephemeral
by design, which do not name themselves ‘festivals’, or which adopt a slightly different format.
6 Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’, 12.
7 New Fest (New York City, 1988-ongoing), 2011 tagline.
8 de Valck, Film Festivals. Marijke de Valck is not the first scholar focusing on film festivals.
She is, however, the first to publish a monograph on the topic. Earlier articles and theses, such
as Julian Stringer’s 2003 PhD dissertation, have largely been (re)discovered after the publication
of de Valck’s foundational opus.

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 Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut 19

simultaneously attempted to energize a European film industry damaged by

two world wars, increasingly suffering from Hollywood’s competition, and
to expand their country’s influence in the context of the Cold War. Cannes,
for instance, was founded on a joint French and American initiative as a way
of countering the influence of Mussolini’s Mostra. Significantly, festivals
did not select films: cultural embassies were responsible for submitting a
national entry. Thomas Elsaesser thus argues that festivals served as a sort
of ‘parliament of national cinemas’, at once promoting films which were
supposed to reflect the character of a nation and replaying or pacifying
conflicts through celluloid.9
In the 1960s, new cinemas and social movements forced international
festivals to adapt their organizational structure. Confronted with the crea-
tion of new political festivals (such as Pesaro in 1964), international festivals
started curating films. According to de Valck, this area corresponds to the
‘age of the programmers’, best symbolized by the creation of side-sections
for innovative and political films (Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight and Berlin’s
International Forum of New Cinema). The 1960s also mark a shift from film
as instrument of cultural diplomacy to a discourse in terms of cinema as
art. With the popularization of the festival format in the 1970s, festivals
increasingly searched to distinguish themselves from one another, notably
through the discovery of new talents. It was the ‘age of the directors’, a shift
accompanied by a new focus on film markets. With the apparition of video
and a boom in independent filmmaking, festivals became legitimized as
key nodes in the circulation of films by the 1990s.10
In that context, de Valck’s opus is largely concerned with festivals’ role as
tastemakers and cultural gatekeepers. Mobilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural
capital and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, de Valck analyzes the role
played by festivals in legitimizing and circulating art cinema. Her description
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

of festivals as a network composed of ‘sites and rites of passages’ relies on

three inter-related arguments: 1. that international festivals constitute a
network through which films circulate (an alternative circuit of exhibition),
2. that festivals, through their selections and awards, add a certain amount
of cultural capital which may then be transformed into profit, and 3. that
festivals structure the economy of film.11
Julian Stringer similarly argues that festivals constitute a ‘multi-functional
phenomenon’ that cannot be reduced to film exhibition. They mark the

9 Elsaesser, ‘Film Festivals Networks’, 88.

10 de Valck, Film Festivals.
11 Ibid., 36-37; See also: de Valck and Soeteman, ‘“And the Winner is…”“.

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 20  LGBTQ Film Festivals

coming together of various stakeholders whose agendas diverge from one

another. Journalists, filmmakers, producers, lawyers, buyers, distributors,
tourists, curators, audience members, and policymakers do not have the
same investment in a festival. Film festivals both rely on and are realized
through an assemblage of sometimes competing performances.12
Since de Valck’s foundational opus, scholarship has largely been dedicated
to determining the shape taken by the ‘festival network’. Some festivals
matter more than others, both economically and culturally: Stringer’s
definition of the circuit as ‘a socially produced space unto itself, a unique
cultural arena that acts as a contact zone for the working through of unevenly
differentiated power relationships’ and Dina Iordanova’s description of
the network as a ‘two-tiered system’ effectively capture this inequality.13
While some festivals add cultural capital, others are mostly concerned with
exhibition: they merely re-screen films (therefore paying rental fees). For
these reasons, the term network, which implies unity and circulation, has
been seen as too monolithic by festival scholars. Festivals are varied and
cannot be reduced to a single entity. As Iordanova puts it:

There is a strict task division between festivals; a small number of major

festivals have leading positions as marketplace and media event and the
remaining majority may perform a variety of tasks ranging from launching
young talent to supporting identity groups.14

In that context, festival scholars have sought to conceptualize various

forms of circuits, coexisting and largely overlapping. This often results in an
ever-growing typological impulse in a scholarship body that distinguishes
A-list festivals from identity-based ones, thematic from generalist, buyers
from players.15 Significantly, Iordanova’s Film Festival Yearbook series
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

focused successively on the notion of a circuit, films festivals in Asia, activist

12 Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 9. See also: Rhyne, ‘Film Festival Circuits and Stakehold-
ers’. A similar argument is made by: Dayan, ‘Looking for Sundance’. The discrepancies between
Stringer’s use of Howard S. Becker’s ‘art world theory’ and de Valck’s emphasis on ‘cultural
capital’ typically reflect different conceptions of the relationship between the cultural and the
economic. On the one hand, Becker’s ‘art world theory’ insists on the cultural as composed of
a network of people whose connections shape artistic discourses: the cultural is marked and
regulated by a cooperative logic. On the other hand, Bourdieu conceptualizes the cultural as a
‘field of struggle’: the meanings we ascribe to work of arts emerge from competing definitions
of ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ capital.
13 Stringer, ‘Regarding Film Festivals’, 109; Iordanova, ‘Film Festivals and Dissent’, 17.
14 Iordanova, ‘The Film Festival Circuit’, 29.
15 Among others: Wong, Film Festivals; Cheung, ‘Funding Models of Themed Film Festivals’.

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 Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut 21

or archival festivals, and festivals in the Middle East.16 Similarly, de Valck’s

Framing Festivals series covered Australian, Chinese, and queer festivals.17
This separation between various types of festivals may at times have
unintended consequences: it forces scholars to present themselves as working
on ‘queer film festivals’ or ‘diasporic film festivals’ as if one’s object of study
was more important than the theoretical arguments or methods used in
our analyses. Furthermore, festivals with a similar curatorial focus are
often understood to belong to a single circuit and to be fundamentally
alike. In that context, festival studies’ typological impulse emphasizes the
differences among various circuits, conceptualized through theoretical
tools and historical narratives devised for A-list events: it may foreclose a
critical examination of the diversity of the festival phenomenon.
Here, I do not aim to discount the knowledge gained through festival
studies’ typological impulse but rather to draw attention to the institutional
and disciplinary logics that condition and shape our work as scholars. As
such, festival studies’ reliance on typologies is partly a consequence of
the mechanisms through which academic knowledge is produced and
disseminated: it enables scholars to be legible and to speak to colleagues
working on a similar historical period, identity, or geographic area outside of
festival studies. Furthermore, the field’s typological impulse often refracts
festival studies’ complex institutional location – between the Humanities
and Social Sciences, film and media studies. Significantly, scholars analyzing
general international festivals and those writing on thematic or identity-
based ones often build upon different disciplinary traditions. While the
former generally draw from media industry studies, the latter rely mainly
on cultural studies and ethnographic observations – focusing on festivals’
role in community-building and identity politics.
The literature on LGBTQ film festivals is here particularly instructive.
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, several articles and dossiers on LGBTQ
festivals were published in Jump Cut and GLQ. They not only predate festival
studies proper but also provide us with an alternative theoretical framework.
For instance, Patricia White’s 1999 GLQ dossier centres on a tension between
the ‘real, truly live place’ of festivals and the idea of festivals as a theoretical
tool. According to her, LGBTQ festivals simultaneously entail a collective

16 Iordanova and Rhyne, Film Festival Yearbook I; Iordanova and Cheung, Film Festival Yearbook
3; Iordanova and Torchin, Film Festival Yearbook 4; Marlow-Mann, Film Festival Yearbook 5;
Iordanova and Van de Peer, Film Festival Yearbook 6. For a non-festival studies analysis of festivals
as they intersect (or do not intersect) with Arab cinema, see: Dickinson, Arab Cinema Travels.
17 Stevens, Australian Film Festivals; Berry, Chinese Film Festivals; Richards, The Queer Film
Festival.

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 22  LGBTQ Film Festivals

experience of queer cinema and constitute an ideal site for reconceptualizing

LGBTQ people’s relationship to film.18 They ‘manufacture’ queerness and/
or authenticate what counts as queer.19
Waugh and Straayer’s GLQ dossiers, although conceived as follow-ups to
White’s, adopt the format of the roundtable.20 In creating a virtual conversa-
tion between festival organizers, curators, and filmmakers, they simultane-
ously emphasize the diversity of the LGBTQ festival phenomenon, nuancing
and even questioning the idea of a unified circuit, and point to the interplay
between curation and academic knowledge production. Significantly, these
dossiers have tended to be interpreted as documentation of LGBTQ festivals
in the early 2000s. Seeing as they do not adopt familiar academic lingo, they
are not immediately legible as important acts of scholarship.
Most of the festival studies scholarship on LGBTQ film festivals is in
the form of unpublished dissertations. Written and/or defended over a
decade ago, they could not have anticipated major developments in queer
filmmaking and cultural organizing. Crucially, these dissertations also
correspond to the beginning of festival studies, understood here as an
independent f ield of academic research. As such, they both built upon
festival studies’ foundational concepts and helped define new methodologi-
cal and theoretical approaches. My choice to rely on these dissertations
thus reflects their centrality in the historical development of the field:
although they have not been published, they shaped the political project
of festival studies.
Scholars focusing on LGBTQ film festivals generally examine the relation-
ships between festival organizing and queer film cultures. Rhyne analyzes
major shifts in the organizational structures of a few US-based LGBTQ
festivals as symptomatic of the advent of a ‘pink dollar’ economy.21 Zielinski
theorizes LGBTQ festivals’ relationship to identity and community politics
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

through Foucault’s heterotopia.22 Loist argues that LGBTQ festivals enact

and crystallize a ‘queer film culture’: they reflect and participate in the
evolution of queer cinema.23 In the only monograph on LGBTQ festivals,
Richards defines queer film festivals as social enterprises that both reflect
the rationality of the creative industry and constantly renegotiate their

18 White, ‘Introduction: On Exhibitionism’, 73.

19 Clark, ‘Queer Publicity at the Limits of Inclusion’.
20 Waugh and Straayer, eds., ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One’; ‘Queer Film
and Video Festival Forum, Take Two’; ‘Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Three’.
21 Rhyne, ‘Pink Dollars’.
22 Zielinski, ‘Furtive, Steady Glances’.
23 Loist, ‘Queer Film Culture’.

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 Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut 23

relationship to community organizing.24 All of these pioneering texts rely on

a few case studies: as their focus is on the emergence of a transnational queer
film culture, they analyze some of the largest, oldest, and most important
international LGBTQ film festivals.
In contrast, this book examines forgotten, minor LGBTQ f ilm fes-
tivals. In so doing, it echoes a growing number of scholars who argue
that festival studies’ conceptual apparatus does not adequately apply to
the vast majority of festivals: its theoretical and methodological tools,
devised for international festivals, do not necessarily account for smaller
events. For instance, Papagena Robbins and Viviane Saglier call for a
critical examination of ‘“other” f ilm festival networks, […] driven not
only by curiosity and the need to always look further, but also by the
very desire to stretch what counts as being part of the festival networks
in order to open its branches and reveal its porosity’.25 Similarly, Lindiwe
Dovey, Joshua McNamara, and Federico Olivieri note that the Slum Film
Festival (Nairobi) ‘does not attract widespread global attention; it is not
a glittering showcase for films and people; it is not a vital node for global
film industries, businesses, institutions, and information’. Consequently,
they argue that there is a

danger in assuming that the channels through which films circulate – such
as film festivals, and other ‘media events’ – are in themselves coher-
ent entities that can be easily understood and unpacked by individual
scholars. While we welcome the new field of film festival studies as a
major advance in film studies, we feel that this field will benefit from
an openness of approach that remains attuned to alternative definitions
of ‘film festivals’.26
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Several scholars have explored how festival studies’ theoretical concepts

presuppose a particular type of festival. For instance, Ezra Winton’s critiques
of festival studies aim at correcting the field’s bias toward fiction films,
thereby insisting on the specif icities of documentary f ilm festivals.27
Similarly, Tascón and Wils develop a theory of activist film festivals.28 In
questioning and/or deconstructing some of festival studies’ main theoretical

24 Richards, The Queer Film Festival.

25 Robbins and Saglier, ‘Introduction’, 4.
26 Dovey, McNamara, and Olivieri, ‘“From, By, For” Nairobi’s Slum Film Festival, Film Festival
Studies, and the Practices of Development’.
27 Winton, ‘Good for the Heart and Soul, Good for Business’, 32-33.
28 Tascón, ‘Opening Thoughts’, 3.

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 24  LGBTQ Film Festivals

concepts, these scholars often adopt a reparative practice that both relies
on and aims at recognizing an understudied type of festival, sometimes
inadvertently replaying the field’s typological impulse. In contrast, this
book builds upon festival studies’ main theoretical contributions: instead of
arguing for the specificity of LGBTQ festivals, it seeks to uncut, or expand,
festival studies’ concepts and methods.
To that end, I do not aim to criticize my colleagues for their insightful
and foundational work. My focus is not on individual texts or scholars but
on the institutional production of knowledge and its effects on festival
scholarship. Similarly, this book does not aim at providing the reader with
an exhaustive survey of the literature on film festivals. As with any scholarly
project, this book is a partial, ‘curated’ intervention. If my framing of ‘film
festival studies’ may at times seem a bit too monolithic, it is done so with the
intention of mapping the constitution of an academic field of research – that
is, to identify festival studies’ key debates and methodological frameworks
and to present an alternative approach.
In particular, this monograph does not account for the development
of a new set of literature on festivals that do not screen f ilms (ranging
from international exhibitions to music festivals to anime conventions).
This new literature, published among others in the new Journal of Festive
Studies, is curiously disconnected from film festival scholarship: as such,
the two fields operate independently, largely ignoring each other. While
future research will benefit from connecting these two independent fields,
my analysis is limited to the emergence and institutional location of film
festival studies. Throughout this book, I thus use ‘festival studies’ as a
shorthand for the development of a field of research concerned with film
and media festivals.
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Queering festival studies: critical (film) festival studies and the

festival as a method

This book attempts to navigate the fine line between being about LGBTQ
festivals and queering festival studies. In theorizing LGBTQ festivals, I aim
to reveal the political project and axiological coordinates of festival studies.
As White’s and Waugh and Straayer’s dossiers suggest, LGBTQ festivals offer
a productive framework for reconceptualizing festivals because and in spite of
identity: LGBTQ festivals’ focus on identity makes visible the power dynamics

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 Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut 25

at the heart of both festival organizing and academic knowledge production.29

In ‘queering festival studies’, this book attends to both the knowledge created by
festivals (queering festivals) and the ways in which scholars create knowledge
of and on festivals (queering festival studies).
While the lexicon ‘uncut’ clearly points to my own position and biases
as a gay man – the gendered imbalance this book suffers from as well as
the desires, fantasies, and imagined encounters it is born out of – this
project is informed by feminist historiographies and epistemologies.30
My use of Women’s Studies might seem anachronistic as the discipline (if
it ever cohesively existed) has been incorporated (both figuratively and
administratively) within gender studies and queer theory departments. In
recuperating some of Women’s Studies’ theoretical debates, in particular as
it relates to the regimes that regulate academic knowledge production, this
book hopes to, as Elizabeth Freeman elegantly states, ‘min[e] the present
for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions’.31
In particular, feminist historiography attempts to counter the erasure of
women from archives/academia and to account for the absence of ontology
of the entity known as women. Schematically, scholars such as Denise Riley
and Joan Wallach Scott seek to simultaneously question the disciplinary
assumptions underlying the writing of linear (some would say heteronorma-
tive) history and resist trans-historical essentializing narratives.32 In this
book, I use feminist historiography both as a method for examining the
political project of festival scholarship and as a model for thinking about
queer subjects throughout history. Feminist historiography urges us to
simultaneously attend to the politics of history-writing and find productive
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

29 To that end, I am not interested in countering the widespread and problematic assumption
according to which gay and lesbian festivals would be of a lesser quality because of identity.
Taking LGBTQ festivals as symptomatic of festivals’ role in knowledge production, my inquiry
seeks to bypass the question of legitimacy altogether.
30 While this book strives not to participate in the erasure of lesbians from queer film history,
it certainly reflects both my own position as a gay man and the gender imbalance at the heart
of queer f ilm history. As I will argue in Chapters 2 and 3, this erasure is partly an effect of
the uneasy positioning of lesbian f ilmmaking / scholarship between feminist and LGBTQ
movements. Similarly, trans filmmaking is relatively recent – and can be seen as being at times
erased by the type of historiographical narrative I propose. Future research will address the
complex relationships between trans and gay and lesbian cinemas at festivals, as well as the
recent development of trans film festivals.
31 Freeman, Time Binds, 16.
32 Riley, ‘Does a Sex Have a History? “Women” and Feminism’, 122; Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’;
Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History.

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 26  LGBTQ Film Festivals

ways of accounting for the similitudes and differences among queer subjects
separated in time and space.
To that end, my use of Women’s Studies echoes recent discussions on
queer temporalities. Drawing on Michel Foucault, scholars have argued that
the notion ‘gays and lesbians’ is a relatively recent (Western) construct.33 In
that framework, queerness entails a particular relationship to time: LGBTQ
people have been simultaneously erased from official histories and archives
and positioned outside of the linear temporality of heterosexuality.34 In that
context, scholars have tried to find ways of accounting for the separation
of queer subjects in time, attempting to negotiate the fine line between the
historical specificity of LGBTQ identities and the transhistorical constant
of same-sex desire.35
Film offers here a productive framework for understanding LGBTQ history
and identities. As Richard Dyer rightly notes in what may be considered as
the first academic book on homosexuality and film, ‘gays have had a special
relationship to the cinema’.36 Indeed, photographs and films played a major
role in the constitution of gay and lesbian subjectivities: the development
of imaging technologies parallels Foucault’s description of the proliferation
of a modern discourse on (homo)sexuality in the 19th century.37 In that
context, photographs and films constitute what Waugh calls a ‘communal
currency’38 as they ‘manage not only to resemble the living flesh of everyday
sexual experience (iconic) but also to testify to the existence of that flesh
(indexical)’.39 LGBTQ festivals refract the temporalities of the cinematic
apparatus: in curating a wide assortment of gay and lesbian films, they fun-
damentally join queer subjects in and through time, visualize (or evidence)
queerness, and entail a specific relationship to temporality.
In addition to feminist historiography, this book is inspired by the debates
over the shift from Women’s Studies to Gender and Sexuality Studies in the
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

1990s. This period provoked a definitional crisis, forcing scholars to describe

33 Halperin, ‘Is There a History of Sexuality?’, 257.

34 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Edelman, No Future.
35 See among others: Carolyn Dinshaw et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable
Discussion’, 178. This debate is largely indebted to 1980s feminist historiography.
36 Dyer, Gays and Film, 2nd edition. Dyer’s use of the word ‘gays’ includes lesbians.
37 Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol.1 : La volonté de savoir. For an analysis of the role
played by these new imaging technologies in shaping medical and scientific discourses on the
queer body, see: Terry, ‘The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity’;
Terry, ‘Lesbians under the Medical Gaze’. These imaging technologies were also are the core of
Hirschfeld’s scientific treatises. See: Dyer, Now You See It, 1st edition, 34.
38 Waugh, ‘Cultivated Colonies’.
39 Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 21. [Emphasis in the original]

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 Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut 27

the differences between the interdisciplinary discipline Women’s Studies,

the political project of Women’s Studies as a f ield committed to social
justice, and the constitution of Women’s Studies as a method of research
slowly adopted in various non-identity-based departments and disciplines
(including film studies). 40 My use of these debates is (1) historical, as they
are emblematic of the advent of neoliberal universities and the evolution of
identity politics, and (2) epistemological, for what they offer is an analytics
of the power dynamics at the heart of academic knowledge production (one
particularly tuned in to how our attachments to our objects of study shape
the scholarship we write).
These debates are consequently refracted in the two theoretical concepts
around which this book is organized: ‘critical festival studies’ and ‘the festival
as a method’. 41 ‘Critical festival studies’ operates as an epistemological cri-
tique, an analysis of the methodological conundrums and political projects
that structure the field of film festival studies. It reveals the assumptions
built into festival studies – how our quest for academic legitimacy orients
our research toward particular ‘festivals that matter’. Conversely, ‘the festival
as a method’ mobilizes festivals not solely as objects of research but as ideal
sites for understanding cinematic cultures. ‘The festival as a method’ tunes
us in to the regimes of knowledge production presupposed in the festival
format itself. As curated juxtapositions of moving images, festivals exemplify
many of film studies’ theoretical conundrums, such as spectatorship, film
cultures, and representational queries. To that end, LGBTQ Film Festivals
operates simultaneously as a critique (or queering) of festival studies and
as a method for expanding – or uncutting – the field.

Labour of love: desiring scholars/festivals

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‘Love! Drama! Sex! Politics!’42

As it will become clear, this book foregrounds my own positionality and

draws a parallel between the act of doing queer academic research and that

40 Among others: Boxer, ‘For and About Women’; Brown, ‘The Impossibility of Women’s Studies’;
Scott, ‘Women’s Studies on the Edge’; Stacey, ‘Is Academic Feminism an Oxymoron?’; Wiegman,
ed., Women’s Studies on Its Own; Wiegman, Object Lessons.
41 I borrow the concept ‘critical festival studies’ from Ezra Winton, see: Robbins, Saglier, and
Winton, ‘Interview with Ezra Winton, Director of Programming at Cinema Politica’.
42 Inside Out Toronto, 2009 tagline.

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 28  LGBTQ Film Festivals

of festival organizing. It is animated by the belief that festival organizing

and academic writing are not antithetical. Both of these activities offer a
framework for understanding the stakes and material realities of knowledge
production. To that end, LGBTQ Film Festivals refuses to separate, or cut, the
author from both its object of study and the people it pays homage to. This
book is, as festival organizers put it, ‘a labour of love’ – one that is offered
to the reader yet that cannot be disentangled from my own experiences.
While the insider/outsider binary (which I deconstruct in Chapters 1 and
3) has structured the field of festival studies, I cannot claim the objective
position of the scholar-as-observer – doing research on rather than with and
at festivals. As such, LGBTQ Film Festivals reflects my own ‘circuits’ and
‘networks’. This book is the result of numerous conversations and arguments.
I draw inspiration and knowledge from my experiences, as a volunteer and
curator at Écrans Mixtes Lyon, MIX NYC, and Image+Nation Montréal, a
film professional liaison officer at Cannes’s Queer Palm, a festival liaison
officer at the Queer Media Database Canada/Québec, and above all as an
avid festival-goer. I do not pretend full authorship and cannot separate
myself from the events this book focuses on and/or the people who have
frequented them – some of whom I have loved.
My tendency to adopt the personal will not surprise queer scholars:
early gay and lesbian film studies notoriously refused to separate academic
labour and community-based politics. From crying in the New York Public
Library archives, especially while reading the last letters sent to Vito Russo,
to sustaining friendships through historical research, my positionality as
researcher and my scholarship refract the role of queer sociality within
academic knowledge production. 43 As Foucault famously argues:

The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather,
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relation-

ships. And, no doubt, that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a
form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at
becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are.

43 I consulted the Vito Russo Archives exactly 25 years after Russo’s death – and was thus the
first scholar able to access several boxes of personal letters and documents which were previously
restricted. I was overwhelmed by Russo’s love letters to his long-term partner Jeffrey Sevcik, as
well as by the farewell notes sent by his students at the University of California, in Santa Cruz.
I am forever grateful to the New York Public Library staff who, despite asking me to leave the
room, offered me their moral support (and handkerchief!).

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 Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut 29

The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is

the one of friendship. 44

Some readers will, between the lines, notice sticky strings and traces of
past and present encounters – my own as well as those of the friends and
colleagues this book analyzes. Friendship and fucking, be it in an academic
context or at festivals, structure artistic and intellectual productions. The
separation of the personal from the intellectual, often held as a cornerstone
of so-called objective research, erases not only how queer people sustain
communities but also how our artistic and scholarly endeavours are
always the result of collaborations and chosen networks of friends. 45 In
the context of this book, I do not want to pretend I have not gained (literal
and figurative) insider knowledge, for instance, in living with someone
who has volunteered at and curated for one of the festivals I examine.
Similarly, this book would not be possible without my PhD advisor, Thomas
Waugh, someone whose scholarship and curatorial practices are analyzed
in various chapters.
Friendship/fucking, gossip, and ‘insider’ knowledge structure both queer
scholars’ and festival organizers’ experiences. To that end, LGBTQ Film
Festivals is fully aligned with B. Ruby Rich’s use of the retrospective gaze of
the autobiography as a method: her book Chick Flicks, which has curiously
been overlooked by festival scholars, may be the only full-length monograph
on sustaining friendships, collaborations, and sexual encounters at and
through festivals / academic conferences. As Rich eloquently puts it,

Knowledge can be acquired and exhibited in a variety of ways. To read

and then to write: that’s the standard intellectual route. In the years of
my own formation, though, there were many other options. Journals and
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

journeys, conferences and conversations, partying and politicking, going

to movies and going to bed. 46

44 Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’; originally published as: Foucault, ‘De l’amitié comme
mode de vie’.
45 The title of this introduction was inspired by John Greyson’s 1997 Un©ut, a f ilm about
intellectual property, censorship, and queer collaborations. In addition to featuring some of
the people this book pays homage to, Un©ut is an exercise in artistic collaborations through
networks of friendship. On this film, see: Zeilinger and Coombe, ‘Three Peters and an Obsession
with Pierre’. On the role played by festivals in sustaining friendships: Damiens, ‘Incestuous
Festivals’.
46 Rich, Chick Flicks, 3. While B. Ruby Rich’s writings on queer cinema are abundantly quoted
by festival scholars, her earlier articles on feminist filmmaking (and women’s film festivals!) have

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 30  LGBTQ Film Festivals

In foregrounding my own experience at LGBTQ festivals, I do not mean to

replay the stereotypes that ‘queer people would be obsessed with sexuality’
and that ‘people attending LGBTQ festivals would not care about film’. 47 If
this book runs the risk of being too personal, it reveals how my attachments
to festivals (and the boys who frequent them) have shaped this research.

The cut: a note on methodology

As I implied earlier, festival studies has largely relied on case studies. In

analyzing particular festivals, scholars may inadvertently replay festivals
studies’ quest for legitimacy: as such, scholars are asked to simultaneously
justify why a particular festival matters and to cast this event as emblematic
of the festival phenomenon as a whole. Put another way, case studies entail
paradigmatic readings. 48 They encode particular assumptions about what
festivals are and refract the disciplinary assumptions embedded in the
field. This book attempts to resist the imperative of case studies. It adopts
an eclectic corpus composed of established festivals, ephemeral events that
only exist as traces in archival collections, and festivals which are generally
ignored in our scholarship.
My analysis is, however, limited to LGBTQ festivals in Western Europe,
the US, and Canada. While I run the risk of replaying a Western-centred
description of the festival phenomenon, this book cannot account for
forms of same-sex sexualities that do not fit with American or European
gayness. As Foucault reminds us, ‘sexuality’ is a relatively recent concept,
tied to and emerging through particular discursive regimes. 49 There is
little evidence that ‘homosexuality’ adequately describes non-Western
same-sex subjectivities. Any consideration of non-Western festivals requires
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

both a deep ethnographic knowledge of the country in which an event is

organized and an understanding of foreign languages. Applying the same

been relatively ignored. As such this conundrum illustrates quite well the uneasy positioning
of lesbians within ‘gay and lesbian cinema’.
47 Queer scholars are constantly asked to justify their focus on queer cinema as cinema. My
experience at the 2015 NECS Conference is here quite instructive: as I was presenting on the
parts of Chapter 1 that pay homage to festival-goers I have known and loved, someone accused
me of insisting too much on the festival as a space of sociality – of prioritizing queerness over
cinema.
48 Wiegman, Object Lessons, 32.
49 Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol.1.; Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité; vol.2 : L’Usage des
plaisirs.

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 Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut 31

monolithic frame of analysis might submerge these subjectivities under the

umbrella of a global gayness, thus replaying the imperialism of Western
frameworks. Although my focus in on LGBTQ festivals organized in the
West, I do not want to suggest that ‘homosexuality’ and ‘queer cinema’ are
concepts that can be applied unilaterally to describe the realities of LGBTQ
people in various European countries, Canada, and the US. In resituating
festivals within the larger context of geographically specific understandings
of queerness, I partly aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of
the West – one that does not take US identity politics as the only way of
expressing same-sex desire.

Curating the book

As this book suggests, LGBTQ festivals’ curatorial practices oftentimes

operate through a juxtaposition of films, a collage that encompasses very
different films (in terms of format, temporality, and geographic origin)
yet creates the illusion of a whole. Festivals produce knowledge through a
sedimentation of discourses and representations. The organization of this
book reflects the act of curation. Each chapter pays attention to a specific
theoretical conundrum. Taken together, these five chapters illustrate both
the regimes of knowledge production at the heart of the festival phenomenon
and the epistemological conundrums of festival studies.
Chapter 1, ‘Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and
the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies’ explores the historiographical and
political project of festival studies. In considering both queer film festivals’
investment in preserving their own history (or lack thereof) and the state of
various French, Canadian, and American archives, I am interested in two
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

inter-related issues. 1. How do institutional settings, professionalization, and

sexual politics shape festivals’ archival practices and/or the very existence
of archives on film festivals? 2. How might we understand the gaps in the
archives, the presence of documents that attest to the existence of yet do
not describe ephemeral festivals? In rescuing or recovering festivals which
have been erased from traditional histories, Chapter 1 operates a critique
of festival studies’ disciplinary unconscious. It reveals the set of theoretical
and axiological coordinates which have conditioned the development of
the field: as such, festival studies is a project dedicated to making (some)
festivals matter within film studies. In uncovering ephemeral festivals, I
thus advocate for a ‘critical festival studies’.

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 32  LGBTQ Film Festivals

Centring on some of festival studies’ theoretical conundrums, Chapter 2

and 3 expand on what a ‘critical festival studies’ could entail. In analyzing
the regimes of taste and films cultures that condition the circulation and
cultural currency of queer cinemas, Chapter 2, ‘The Queer Film Ecosystem’,
aims to reconceptualize the notion of festival circuits. It locates queer
cinema at the intersection of two regimes of cultural value – identity and
cinephilia. Through a Bourdieusian approach to taste-making and cultural
production, I highlight how both festivals and scholars negotiate these
conflicting cultural values. Film traff ic relies on a symbolic economy
that is based on and fosters differentiated cultural discourses on queer
cinema. In analyzing the strategies of both European and American film
distributors, I underscore how this interplay between queerness and
cinephilia is strategically mobilized so as to assert a f ilm’s legitimacy
and authenticity.
Chapter 3, ‘Out of the Celluloid Closet, Into the Theatres!’ revisits tradi-
tional historical accounts of the development of both gay and lesbian cinema
and festivals. In particular, I trace the emergence and mutation of the concept
‘gay and lesbian cinema(s)’ – a relatively recent notion shaped through an
interplay between film criticism, festival organizing, and scholarship. I
detail the careers and works of various critics and scholars as they intersect
with LGBTQ festival organizing. In highlighting the networks of friend-
ship, fucking, and collaboration that informed the development of LGBTQ
cinema, I nuance the divide between scholars, critics, and practitioners
that has been instrumental in asserting the legitimacy of festival studies
and describe various uses of the festival format as a praxis of academic
knowledge production.
Chapters 4 and 5 shift the focus from ‘critical festival studies’ to ‘the
festival as a method’. Chapter 4, ‘Festivals as Archives: Collective Memory
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

and LGBTQ Festivals’ Temporality’ pays attention to LGBTQ festivals’

visual productions and curatorial practices. As events dedicated to the
screening of sexual images, LGBTQ festivals are enmeshed with the
accumulation of temporalities and affects. As such, their f ilm selec-
tion is akin to a collage or a juxtaposition of f ilms, each with a peculiar
relationship to history. Through their selections and visual productions,
festivals make time ‘matter’: they constitute a virtual archive and entail
a particular type of relationship with gay and lesbian visual history. In
positing that festivals constitute an ideal space for theorizing gay and
lesbian spectatorship, Chapter 4 argues that LGBTQ festivals exemplify
some of the modalities through which we access, visually, gay and lesbian
cultural memory.

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 Introduc tion. Festivals, Uncut 33

Chapter 5, ‘Images + Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Ho-

moscapes’ focuses on the geographic imaginaries embedded in festival
programming. In screening films from various countries, festivals participate
in the circulation of various geographically specific representations of
queerness. I argue that festivals provide us with a model for thinking
through the globalization of queerness. Borrowing from gay linguists’ focus
on the interplay between geography and subjectivities, I pay attention to
the language used to describe various films and contend that catalogues
perform the task of cultural translation. They reinterpret films from a
foreign context for a nationally situated audience. As institutions screening
films from all around the world, they simultaneously localize films from
other geographical contexts and provide us with various discourses on the
globalization of queerness.
While this book can be understood as an epistemological intervention
in festival studies, it should not be taken as a totalizing critique of the
field. As such, it is not exempt from the conundrums it seeks to analyze. I
address these issues in my conclusion, a meditation on the nature of field
interventions that posits critical f ilm festival studies and ‘the festivals
that did not matter’ as already enmeshed in the search for scholarly
legitimacy.

Speaking in queer tongues: a note on terminology

The words we use matter, especially so when it comes to sexuality. They

refract various forms of articulation between desires, subjectivities and social
movements. Concepts such as ‘gays and lesbians’, ‘LGBTQ’, and ‘queer’ reflect
historically situated conceptualizations of sexual desires. The difference
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

between gay and lesbian, LGBTQ, and queer festivals is however not so
clear-cut. The name a festival ‘gives itself’ is not necessarily indicative of its
sexual politics.50 A self-proclaimed queer festival might adhere to a quite
classical gay and lesbian programming. As Zielinski puts it,

these festivals have gone through a number of important name changes

over the years that reflect, to various degrees of success, changes in their
structure and policies regarding content, effectively revealing their self-
understanding and how they want to been [sic] understood […] In fact,
to discuss these festivals in general quickly becomes quite a semantic

50 As explored in: Gever, ‘“The Names We Give Ourselves”’.

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 34  LGBTQ Film Festivals

challenge. Does the use of ‘lesbian and gay’ negate the broadened LGBTQ
claim of most festival today? When or under what conditions might an
LGBTQ film festival ever be queer? Not only have their names changed,
but also the meaning of the words comprising them.51

For these reasons, I adopt the following conventions:

– When discussing a specific event, I respect the terminology adopted
by the festival – the name it gave itself within its historical context.
– In order to avoid anachronism and to emphasize historical specificity, I
mobilize the term best fitted with a festival’s context. For instance: when
discussing 1970s festivals, I use the terminology ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’,
– When my inquiry is not limited by historical specificity, I mobilize ‘gay
and lesbian’, ‘LGBTQ’, and ‘queer’ interchangeably.

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Pierre: Intellectual Property in John Greyson’s Un©ut’. In The Perils of Pedagogy:
The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie, and
Thomas Waugh, 438–449. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s
Press, 2013.

Damiens, Antoine. LGBTQ Film Festivals : Curating Queerness, Amsterdam University Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=6379108.
Created from kcl on 2024-12-22 03:56:16.
 38  LGBTQ Film Festivals

Zielinski, Ger. ‘Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of
Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals’. PhD diss., McGill, 2008.

Filmography

Un©ut. Directed by John Greyson. 1997. 97 min. Canada. PROD: Grey Zone. DIST:
Domino Film & Television International.
Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Damiens, Antoine. LGBTQ Film Festivals : Curating Queerness, Amsterdam University Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=6379108.
Created from kcl on 2024-12-22 03:56:16.