On Wednesday, October 5th, 2016, Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (the founders of the Global Queer Cinema website and research project) will give a presentation on their work in the Autumn Research Seminar Series of the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex (4-6pm in Jubilee Building 117/8).

The title and abstract of their talk are as follows:

Queer cinema creates worlds, intervening in existing debates on the national, transnational and global as well as envisioning new modes of being in the world. This talk will focus on how contemporary queer films imagine Europe, and how dissident gender and sexual identities intersect with persistent questions of European politics, spaces, and identities. We will analyse border-crossing films, considering how tropes of immigration and mobility articulate sexuality with race, nationality, and marginality within and outside the EU. Looking at representations of the Muslim queer, we ask how this cinematic figure responds both to liberal visions of Europe and to a broader global politics of borders, Islamophobia, and the war on terror. We also explore the transnational within Europe, considering how popular genre films intersect the politics of LGBT tolerance with issues of national identity, political violence, and human rights.

December 2016 will see the launch of Schoonover and Galt’s keenly anticipated co-authored book Queer Cinema in the World, published by Duke University Press.

In this book, proposing a radical vision of cinema’s queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.