Medien|Denken – Marc Siegel – My Levitating Butt

The aesthetics of visibility politics, associated with the lesbian and gay liberation movement cinemas of the 1970s and ’80s, still drive most discussions of queer cinema. Queer has come to function primarily as an identity category and queer films tend to be only those that are either made by or represent queer people. At the time of its initial theorization, however, queer marked a challenge to the fixity of identity and suggested a beyond to existing regimes of representation. How can we incorporate this critical perspective on identity and representation into a concept of queer cinema? What kind of queer cinema pictures not simply queer lives and loves but, more importantly, those realms of abstraction beyond figuration? Relying on examples from the history of avant-garde film and video, this talk argues for the importance of aesthetic and narrative innovation to an understanding of queer cinema.