Queer or Human?  [Slideshow]

Queer or Human? [Slideshow]

  • Animal: Spectating Deer in Istanbul and Ankara

This slide show collects images from recent queer film festival branding gathered by GQC co-founder Karl Schoonover.  Seen together, these slides reveal three iconographies of representing queers — animals, avatars, and objects — all of which avoid or attempt to bypass the specificity of the human body.  Schoonover further explores the political consequences and potentials of such promotional imagery in an article entitled “Queer or human? LGBT film festivals, human rights and global film culture” published by the journal Screen.  (Full text available by clicking the link.)

He begins by writing:
“In the mid 1990s, many LGBT film festivals began to avoid including obviously human figures in their promotional imagery and branding. On websites and posters, and in programmes and street advertising, images of LGBT humans were exchanged for avatars of queerness:cartoon monsters, brightly coloured everyday objects or cute animals. Most often these avatars appeared in groups, as a gathering of faceless alien astronauts, an array of cupcakes or a crowd of penguins. This deceptively simple imagery raises the question of the human by an intriguing evasion of human figures. This evasion asks us to consider how LGBT politics figures the human and how the queer appears in international human rights debates.”