Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Generic conventions within queer cinema (re)present discursive formations of queer bodies that reflect public projects of identity location along a binary axis of sexual identity performance. According to these conventions the queer subject is limited along this axis to adopting a heterosexual vernacular of identity performance or a vernacular of camp and the spectacular as a means of delineation/differentiation from the heterosexual majority. Whether passing or rejecting to pass, these generic conventions are attempts at normativization of the queer self that have as their cathexis narrative constructions of the closet and closeted-ness. The queer self is always already positioned discursively in relation to the closet which is modeled in/through heterosexist subject positionings of identity (re)presentation and performance. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, "'[c]losetedness' itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence - not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it" (3). There are multiple modalities of speaking in relation to one's sexuality, sexual desires, and sexual practices, the manner in which they are spoken about - or not spoken about - for the queer subject, is relationally positioned to the closet and imbibed with heterosexist notions of normative sexuality/sexual practices and the privilege of publicity that hetero-sexual practices are afforded.
Repository Citation
High, Bradley. "Boys Will Be Boys With Boys: The Real and Queer Subjectivity in Film." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 3, 2009, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss3/13