Queer Film and Media Pedagogy

Queer Film and Media Pedagogy Bronski, Michael. Ginsberg, Terri. Grundmann, Roy, 1963Keeling, Kara, 1971More

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number 1, 2006, pp. 117-134 (Article) Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/glq/summary/v012/12.1bronski.html

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Moving Image Review

QUEER FILM AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY Michael Bronski, Terri Ginsberg, Roy Grundmann, Kara Keeling, Liora Moriel, Yasmin Nair, and Kirsten Moana Thompson

Introduction

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (GLBTQ) scholars today face

an unprecedented travesty of their long-standing struggles for liberation and equality both in academe and throughout the public sphere. Notwithstanding increased positive GLBTQ representation in films and on television, anti-GLBTQ violence and disempowering legislative initiatives evidence a pervasive chipping away at hard-won pro-GLBTQ battles by neoconservative and neoliberal forces, which have insinuated themselves through the back door. The acuteness of these troubling conditions prompts urgent questions among GLBTQ film and media scholars, not least because their primary areas of study lie at the center of battles for control of public knowledge production about the general subject. These battles are now producing some of the most egregious consolidations of media industrial power in history: recalling Ben H. Bagdikian, the communications industry has become a “media monopoly” that works to sustain multinational rivalry over the world’s dwindling natural resources and increasingly disenfranchised labor force, dumb down the populace, politically isolate demographic regions, and suppress speech and free dissent, especially regarding strategies of resistance, wherever they may flourish.1 The following roundtable on queer film and media pedagogy is intended to

GLQ,12:1 Vol. 1, pp. 000–000 GLQ 997117–134 Paul EeNam Park Hagland pp. © Duke University Press Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press

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open space for long-overdue, much-needed dialogue and debate over these issues and the questions to which they allude, and in turn to supply reasons for GLBTQ academics’ refusal to comply with institutional pressures on them to assimilate, return to ghetto culture and the closet, or keep silent about their difficult histories and efforts so as to prop up an ostensible GLBTQ “market.” Apparent in everything from subway ads to television shows, this viable sense of “queer” is often conceptually so alienated from the real diversity of GLBTQ communities that its cultural products risk serving as mere tokens for the vicarious entertainment of majority straights — who are nonetheless ideologically positioned in this way to identify “queerly” — and for exploitation by the media industry and its executives, most of whom are likewise far removed from everyday GLBTQ life. As the United States continues to rationalize the violent subjugation of global peoples on the assumed bases of “women’s liberation” (Afghanistan, Iran), “world pride” (Palestine/Israel), and “humanitarian intervention” (Iraq, Lebanon, Syria), five GLBTQ scholars, representing a progressive spectrum of national, class, gender, sexual, racial, generational, and disciplinary positions, have much to say about their work as film and media pedagogues. These scholars have been asked to answer questions about teaching GLBTQ film and media in the context of the institutional and political struggles undertaken since the early 1990s. For example, they consider if, in light of current social conditions, the concept of sex/gender “identity” still plays a significant and useful role in the organization and implementation of their GLBTQ film and media syllabi. They also discuss how GLBTQ film and media pedagogues now structure the inclusion of GLBTQ material into non-GLBTQ-specific courses. What discourses, theories, and cinematic practices do the discussants think characterize this shift toward inclusion, if indeed it has taken place, and how do they think such practices relate to contemporary conditions and events? What course materials have the discussants generally employed to exemplify, perform, and critique this apparent curricular shift? Do they think that the recent academic restructuring around interdisciplinarity, which in film studies is oriented overwhelmingly toward media studies and technoscientific training and development (e.g., “the incursion of ‘the digital’ into film,” as one discussant puts it), has affected what many scholars perceive as a shift away from “identity”-based analysis to more far-reaching, or perhaps much narrower, approaches? Has the interdisciplinary turn effected curricular and institutional resituations of the GLBTQ film and media courses that the discussants have planned and taught in recent years? Do they see “queer” as now serving ideological functions vis-à-vis interdisciplinarity and its socioeconomic entailments, and what do they think constitutes a critical pedagogical engagement with this devel-

queer film and media pedagogy

opment? Do their integrations of “queer” into syllabi reflect any such engagement, and what classroom experiences have in turn been enabled? Put another way, do the discussants find it still, or perhaps especially, useful to utilize pedagogical techniques that signify “queerness” or that structurally overdetermine their syllabi as “queer”? What might those techniques be, and what, from the discussants’ respective disciplinary orientations, have been their educational and intellectual effects? How in this regard do the discussants see the discourses and theories that make up a historically multidisciplinary GLBTQ film studies functioning in their pedagogical approaches to queer film and media? Has film studies undergone a paradigm shift, and if so, what critical and cinematic modalities can be expected to frame and perhaps dominate future queer film and media studies? In view of recent social, institutional, political-economic, and epistemological changes, that is, what do the discussants believe now makes for a meaningful and effective queer film and media pedagogy? All of the roundtable participants believe that GLBTQ film and media studies has changed since the early 1990s, but their explanations vary. Their concerns include queer film and media studies’ unstable opening onto the non- and postidentitarian discourses enabled by critiques of racist assumptions and exclusions associated with prior “gay and lesbian” formations. Many of the discussants see a need for the popular “queer” tendency toward mainstreaming and recloseting to be critiqued in light of feminism and anticapitalist analyses of U.S. global hegemony. Several also grapple with the elision of formalist film and media theory, an elision that some of them view as symptomatic of an antitheoretical turn away from the analysis of film and media aesthetics associated with the avant-garde. Such a turn, they believe, lends “queer” a cryptic quality that, ironically, reinforces academic elitism, political dogmatism, and social privilege.—Terri Ginsberg Kirsten Moana Thompson: Inevitably, queer studies has changed since the early 1990s and has affected the teaching of queer film, in the same way that queer emerged as a pedagogically and conceptually flexible term to signal a shift beyond GLBT representation to broader theoretical explorations of sexual practices, identifications, and representations that were not restricted to questions of identity, communitarian politics, and/or affiliations. This shift enabled the field to engage questions of deviancy, alterity, pathology, and perversity and, in general, to consider the instability of categories, whether of anatomical sex, gender, or sexual desire, and the lack of congruence among these categories. Furthermore, while certain genres in GLBTQ film persist as die-hards (the coming-out story, the subculturalpractices documentary, the biopic), other films continue to complicate questions of

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identity across race, gender, class, and sexuality boundaries. These films can be taught as part of any film class, and I tend to teach more of this material “outside” a traditional graduate seminar, with a specific focus on queer film and theory. Roy Grundmann: I also think that the teaching of queer film has undergone several shifts over the past fifteen years, and I see them as reflecting changes in the contemporary film/media landscape and in the concept of “queer” itself. In 1990 I began to teach queer media by analyzing Hollywood homophobia. These days my students pay less attention to movies. Their queer media diet focuses more on Queer as Folk, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The L Word, Will and Grace, and Six Feet Under. This change in viewing habits is not insignificant. It alerts us to the importance of addressing television critically. These shows pretend to be accurate reflections of queerness, when they are, first and foremost, reflections of mainstream television’s values and politics of representation. TV promises to lend us all a queer eye; however, here, as in black-family and single-women sitcoms and countless other examples, TV is really a leveler of identity, not a diversifier. Its putative queerness is always already the product of nonqueer interests. But critically discussing television is only one aspect of queer media pedagogy. It remains important to expose students consistently to alternative media. And understanding these alternatives in turn requires understanding the evolution of the concept of “queer.” Kara Keeling: Each course I have developed that focuses on issues of sexuality seeks to explore and interrogate the onscreen appearance of ostensibly lesbian, gay, and transgender subjectivities while holding the category of “queer” open as a dynamic, politically oriented site of inclusiveness and challenge to the smooth, exclusionary production of normative sexualities. The way I develop syllabi in my interdisciplinary area of media and cultural studies, for instance, is informed by the publication of studies since 2000, such as those by David Eng and Roderick A. Ferguson, that foreground the imbrications of the production of nonheteronormative sexualities with the production of racialized subjects. 2 Insofar as it is increasingly accepted that conditions of oppression and exploitation that are rooted in sexual difference and “sex/gender identity” cannot be thought of outside the context of their production in hierarchical systems of economic, racial, and cultural differences, my syllabi seek to complicate students’ commonsensical understandings of the production and circulation of “queer representations” in visual media while prompting them to interrogate the ideological work that those images nonetheless do in their circulation.


Michael Bronski: I’m not sure that the elemental teaching of queer films has undergone a change so much as students’ backgrounds and expectations have shifted dramatically. In my experience, students are now far less interested simply in discussions of “positive” and “negative” images and more concerned with surveying “queer film” in broader social and political contexts, but through a “queer” lens. This has been true when I have taught canonical GLBTQ films — The Killing of Sister George, Cruising, and The Uninvited — and also films outside this canon, as well as shows like Queer as Folk or The L Word. So it has been possible for me to plan and promote more interesting discussions and to push the materials into new arenas. I taught a film-based course in the spring of 2003 titled “Judaism, Sexuality, and Queerness” — the films included The Dybbuk, Angels in America, Capturing the Friedmans, Ali G., and Yidl mitn Fidl — and the students had little trouble moving from close readings to sophisticated, theoretical discussions about the interrelatedness of constructions of religion, desire, and identity. Terri Ginsberg: That course was taught at an Ivy League school. What about less prepared students in underfunded environments, where dumbing down is often the rule and where progressive pedagogues face very different challenges when trying to introduce sophisticated, theoretical, and socially transformative concepts and discourses to young adults not descended primarily from the ruling and upper middle classes? Yasmin Nair: I began my foray into queer pedagogy, or teaching “queer,” in the 1990s in West Lafayette, Indiana. My colleagues and I found ourselves in a geographic and cultural space easily identifiable as antiqueer and racist, and that fact lent a sense of insurgency to our collective work as teachers and scholars. Queer theory may have been flourishing elsewhere in the academy, but in West Lafayette teaching queer film and media seemed inherently subversive. So I eventually relocated to Chicago and began to teach at a university often referred to as one of the most diverse campuses in the country. Here I taught students from notoriously underserved public schools that had barely taught them the basics of writing. Yet these same students had been effectively schooled in the rhetoric and the ideology of a respect for difference. 3 Consequently, my students were not averse to queer themes and texts. They scorned the homophobia of the nineteenth-century medical texts that we read for a course on the construction of gender and sexuality. During a visual culture course I showed clips from the gay porn star Ryan Idol’s oeuvre with impunity (and a word of caution: they had the option of leaving the classroom during the screening). They had been raised to believe that hating queers was

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wrong; most of them had gay- or lesbian-identified friends and relatives; they knew that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact. Thompson: Well, with a sense in the late 1990s that the emergence of queer theory as a subspecialty in the humanities had “peaked,” and with the increasing normalization of queer representation on mainstream television and film (Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Girl), “queer” has joined the panoply of theories from race to class and gender that interrogate notions of identity, subjectivity, desire, and so on. Nair: Indeed. By the time I had relocated to Chicago, things had changed even in small-town Indiana, with a new university president approving long-fought-for changes like domestic partnership benefits and a commitment to racial, sexual, and gender diversity. I’ve since realized that there never was, pedagogically speaking, much difference between West Lafayette and Chicago. What I’d construed as a yawning gap between the two has not shrunk so much as revealed itself to be a mirage. Each place became more like the other, impelled toward a tolerance for diversity of all kinds, even if at different speeds. Across campuses and the culture at large, we are privy to an intense fetishization of difference and the proliferation of a particular kind of identity politics: one divorced from any political understanding of the power relations that determine identities as such. My students knew it was wrong, or at least unpopular, to hate people with AIDS. But they had no cultural memory of the history of AIDS activism by groups like ACT UP and had never seen the guerrilla media work of collectives like Deep Dish and Paper Tiger Television. That’s no surprise, given that AIDS activism has been recast in the form of expensive fund-raising dinners, events that are widely publicized but make no demands for structural change in medical research and the pharmaceutical industry. Liora Moriel: I know what you mean. When Angels in America is shown on HBO with a cast of stars and wins awards, it is hard to believe that ACT UP has become a welcome guest at the dinner table. What next? Will Tony Kushner receive a Kennedy Center award from George W. Bush? The play won a Pulitzer Prize, among many other awards, and is deservedly iconized and lionized. But how can a work so critical of the mainstream be so embraced by it? Surely as teachers we must present this question to our students and help them answer it in incisive ways. Nair: To that end, I’m concerned less with whether or not I can engage in queer pedagogy than with the conditions in which I’m able to do so.


Bronski: What I have seen is that “queer film studies” has become “queerer” — that is, open to a far wider, more subversive, and less stable range of investigative methods and questions — as students have become less attached to discussing film as an art or even a technique. Thompson: Although technology as both medium and mode is increasingly a pedagogical means to explore the relationship among discourse, identity, and representation with reference to the Internet, cell phones, instant messaging, cybersex, video gaming, blogging, and so on. Likewise, recent research into turn-of-thecentury photographic archives calls into question received assumptions about fin de siècle formations of the homosexual/heterosexual subject in sexology and medicojuridical literature.4 Moriel: This is partly because cinema studies has changed with the advent of each theory and theorist, and the past couple of decades have seen a proliferation of both. There are more film classes and more venues for academic as well as independent criticism than ever before. And the proliferation of blogs and e-journals is expanding an already enlarged field. To my mind, this is a good thing, because queer criticism has become not a niche genre but part of the conversation about the way that film works as a cultural tool for both inclusion and suppression. It is important that students, as well as the general public, become aware of these manipulations. Grundmann: By the same token, the concept of “queer” has itself undergone changes that reflect the evolving status of sex/gender “identity” and of North American identity politics under liberal pluralism. It is daunting enough to compress into one syllabus the whole of gay and lesbian political and cultural history before one even arrives at the term queer, that is, before the emergence of queer theory and queer cultural pluralism in the 1990s. Not to mention the difficulty of adequately addressing the current polarization between “gay” and “queer,” triggered by a queer critique of the perceived political apathy of many postliberation gays and lesbians and of the scandalizing support it receives from some neoliberal and conservative politics. This gay-versus-queer debate has been prominent for some time, and the rise of gay conservatism is, in fact, as embarrassing as it is worrisome. Yet despite the political exigencies that have necessitated the queer disavowal of “gay,” this disavowal is also sometimes marked by parochialism and dogmatism. Nair: Just consider how “queer” on campuses has become both an object of consumption and part of the institutional network of GLBTQ support offices. I don’t deny the importance of student services for queers on campus, but I do wish to note

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their insidious effects. They have resulted in a straightening and homogenizing of “queer,” because their funding and sponsorship usually depend on their presenting acceptable faces of conformity, nonpromiscuous commitment, and bland corporate identity. The changes we see are not just part of the cultural conservatism and self-policing of queer communities. Since Columbine and 9/11 they are also direct effects of the “war on terrorism.” Where, in this era of intense surveillance and policing, are the public spaces, libraries, and bathrooms, where queers might scope out their own?5 Where is the space for angry, subversive, radical, promiscuous, nonhetero queers? Where, in the midst of a shift toward tolerance and understanding of the (only slightly different) queer body, is the possibility for a radical queer pedagogy in film and media? Thompson: As I see it, this “mainstreaming” of queer representation since the early 1990s is actually one way into addressing theories about consumerism, commodity fetishism, Marxism, semiotics, and so forth. Contemporary as well as classical film theory and philosophy remain important pedagogical organizing discourses around which students explore representation, aesthetics, desire, subjectivity, and other issues in my classes, and so feminism and psychoanalysis remain key theoretical discourses in course readings. Similarly, recent work in transnational diasporic studies usefully raises “queer” as one dimension of how the global and the national are in contestation.6 Keeling: Indeed, a heightened critical awareness of “queer” as a marker of difference in disparate locations, coupled with the global availability of “queer films” produced in sociocultural contexts different from those of the United States, necessitates, it seems to me, the development of queer media pedagogies capable of attending to the particularities of articulations of “queer” sexualities from different locations without imposing on them specifically U.S. notions of “lesbian and gay” sociopolitical and cultural formations.7 For me, teaching queer film and media today involves a willingness to be challenged by texts such as Deepa Mehta’s 1996 film Fire and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s 1994 film Strawberry and Chocolate, both of which lend themselves to analysis from within the discourses and theories elaborated to engage U.S. films while suggesting that they are indifferent to those theories. Grundmann: At the same time, we need to remember that in our legitimate and necessary critiques of gay mainstreaming (epitomized by gay marriage), we sometimes become so judgmental and dogmatic that we run the risk of replicating the


classic sectarian insularity of an orthodox vanguard that, in its attempt to educate “the masses,” condescends to them, judging their desires and ignoring their needs — only to end up being widely ignored itself. In our justified outrage over the homophobia and moral bigotry of George W. Bush and the religious and political Right, we have sometimes managed to vilify some of our own sex practices, porn productions (male and female), drug experiments, even circuit parties — in fact, we have consistently championed queer cross-identification over desire, happy to imply that, these days, simply being homosexual doesn’t cut it on the oppression scale. After articulating our incisive critique of gay consumerism, we go right on to salvage our favorite consumer items theoretically by queering them. In our ambitious analyses of gay professionals selling out to corporate ideology, we tend to overlook that every single one of us is subject to the supply and demand of the mercantile, commerce-driven, quasi-corporate queer academy. (Our graduate students are learning the ropes of narrating their own oppressed identities so as to bring them to reification for institutional leverage — read: teaching positions, book contracts, speakers’ fees, and, most important, academic fame!) In our understandable desire to revivify revolutionary instances of our own history, we have found new movements such as “gay shame,” but we have yet to prove the sustainability of this — or any — political movement predominantly on the strength of a negative vector. Keeling: In my “Special Topics in Media Studies” class titled “Race, Sexuality, and Cinema,” an advanced undergraduate course I developed and taught for the first time in fall 2004 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we did in fact explore not only how normative heterosexualities have been produced and deployed cinematically over time but also how the more recent production of normative homosexualities extends the logics of normative sexuality in ways that require a reframing of what constitutes “queer” sexualities, as well as the rationale for that reframing. This is not to say that we did not attend to questions surrounding “representations” of homosexuals and lesbians in film and the work that those representations have done and continue to do, but we approached those questions with different expectations about what our interrogations would yield. We, for example, questioned rather than called for the drive toward greater queer visibility, even as we remained aware that our ability to ask questions about the drive toward greater visibility was possible only because some visibility has been achieved, both onscreen and in academe. Ginsberg: I recently taught an advanced freshman writing seminar at Dartmouth College titled “Jewish Memoir and Biography in Film and Literature,” in which we

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screened The Times of Harvey Milk and read Living My Life, the autobiography of Emma Goldman.8 Whereas I am always keen to criticize dogmatism and hypocrisy on the GLBTQ left, and while I strongly support and encourage autocritique, I question how constructive it is for us progressive academic queers to spend inordinate time and energy berating ourselves for our purported sectarian tendencies, and subsequently censoring ourselves through a skillful deployment of dialectic, when in fact the sectarianism in our midst is incredibly weakened and dysfunctional compared to the subversive ideologies associated with groups like the Log Cabin Republicans. The real GLBTQ dogmatism and hypocrisy do not hail from some imagined plethora of gay sectarians infiltrating our ranks — a claim easily interpretable as presumptuous and McCarthyist, especially when one considers the relatively delimited condition of GLBTQ studies on campuses, such as many in Florida, where sexual orientation is not a protected category either in the state constitution or in union collective bargaining agreements. We should be directing the better part of our vigilance at the neoliberal and conservative camps, which, backed by tremendous political and financial power, together frame GLBTQ problematics and promote public discourse and debates that have been working effectively, almost insurmountably, to forward agendas ultimately deleterious to GLBTQ people on a global scale. A case in point is Phyllis Chesler’s incendiary presentation at the “Middle East and Academic Integrity on the American Campus” conference, which was convened on March 6, 2005, at Columbia University in honor of the right-wing propaganda film Columbia Unbecoming and sponsored by right-wing organizations such as Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the David Project (the latter produced the film). Chesler, author of the 1972 feminist classic Women and Madness,9 at once emphasized her historical feminism and progay, antiracist politics and decried “multiculturalist” insistence on equality for Palestinian women, in turn positioning herself and the audience as victims of feminists, gays, and African Americans who would so much as question her views. According to this self-proclaimed “progressive,” socially marginalized groups disingenuously exploit their struggles and disenfranchisement to wring undeserved sympathy (read: “special rights”) from the U.S. mainstream. Moriel: Listen, words like sex and gender and identity shift in the sands of science and technology even as we study them, so I am not sure what impact these issues will ultimately have. Things are changeable, and so are these supposedly discrete categories. I think that our task as queer theorists and teachers is not to provide firm answers to fluid questions. Interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary inquiries are wonderful in that they do not allow us to brush one tooth, in Tom Robbins’s


wonderful definition of specialization; they insist on a more holistic approach.10 Queer criticism and pedagogy are not separate from other disciplines, to my mind, but are part of a range of intellectual inquiries that make us and our students better, more caring, and more informed citizens. In this way, curiously, I am conservative even though my students frequently inform me that I am the most liberal instructor they have ever had. For what is more important than to provide students with the tools to cut to the heart of the matter (film, theory, information, politics, self-awareness, global awareness, etc.), to equip them to survive, even thrive, in a world in which a glut of visual images and information has made us numb and overwhelmed? Keeling: Along these lines, what can be perceived as a shift in film and media studies away from identity-based politics and cultural analysis finds correlates both in a broadly framed critique of “single-issue” (“identity-only”) politics articulated from within the GLBTQ movements in the United States and in the elaboration of rhetorical and organizing strategies designed to animate and advance that critique. At the same time, mainstream media, including film, increasingly traffic in “lesbian and gay images” even as the incursion of “the digital” into film calls into question formulations of film as a representational medium. Under pressure from the digital, film studies has had to confront anew its complex and often contentious relationships to other visual media and other media technologies. This confrontation today provides queer film and media studies scholars with the opportunity to reframe concerns about the power of media images, concerns that were previously articulated in large part through the language of “stereotypes,” “positive” versus “negative” images, “identity,” “difference,” “ideology,” and so on. Bronski: What I have been working on in recent courses is bringing “queer theory” to the material in a way that allows students to enjoy and work on decentering the material and yet forces them to deal with the technical aspects of film as well as its political and social content. In the mid-1990s my students had a more difficult time with “queer”; these days they allow it to override most other aspects of analysis. So while I am not sure that I would have taught this material differently ten years ago, I am even less sure what “makes for a meaningful and effective queer film and media pedagogy” today. I am interested in why students are now more capable of sophisticated, theoretical discussions. I think that it is in large part because, in this historical moment, they are more disengaged from an organized GLBTQ movement and feel no allegiance to more traditional aspects of identity politics. But, more important, my sense is that while students are far more media

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savvy today than a decade ago, they are less interested in film per se. While they are more likely to be able to “read” and respond to images and technique — an ability that to a large degree reflects the infiltration of media studies even at the high school level — they seem less concerned about analyzing film itself and more concerned about the issues it raises. In this sense, it is easier to bring to the conversation a host of discourses (psychoanalysis being, in my classes, one of the most productive) than it was before, but what has been lost is the emphasis on film. Thompson: I teach film and/or queer theory in a small film program within a large English department offering concentrations in film, creative writing, linguistics, and other subjects. The students I teach are not necessarily film majors, or even English majors; they can be communications majors (from the School of Performing Arts) or students from elsewhere in the College of Liberal Arts. So I tend to incorporate more queer theory into my undergraduate lecture classes and graduate seminars on film theory or contemporary theory, rather than in a specialty course. The reasons for this are partly practical and strategic: certain theory classes are prerequisites for graduate majors, and in them I can introduce many more students to some queer theory than I can in the small specialty queer seminars. In this regard, my pedagogical practice considers how “queer” is a broad rubric in which to explore questions of knowledge, pleasure, desire, identity, and performance across the traditional interdisciplinarity and theoretical heterogeneity of English studies today. Just as the object of study in English is amorphous, always evolving from literature to music videos to the Internet, so “queer” has been a useful tool with which to move away from (nominal) specialty courses and on to wider investigations of the public sphere, citizenship, the urban, the global, and so forth. So my institutional context has already shaped the interdisciplinary aspects of both the content of my courses, which include queer theory and queer film, and the heterogeneous makeup of my student audiences. Moriel: The bottom line for me is also to situate queer film and media criticism squarely in the mix of academic approaches to the study of culture, sociology, history, literature, linguistics, anthropology, criminal justice, psychology, even science and math. (I have always been fascinated that some universities award an MA in math while others award an MS.) Teachers of queer film and media studies have a lot to offer. Keeling: Well, yes. In the present milieu, a “queer film and media pedagogy” is most effective when it situates itself vis-à-vis “queer” according to that term’s


most expansive gestures toward the inclusion of various expressions and forms of nonheteronormativity and challenges to compulsory heterosexuality. To the extent that such a queer film and media pedagogy might intervene in the ways that students themselves participate in the exclusionary, differentiating processes that animate the market for gay and lesbian images (and, perhaps, in the ways that the hard-won, tenuous, and still necessary logic that informs the institutionalization of “queer film and media studies” in the academy mirrors those processes by isolating the study of “queer film and media” from other areas of investigation), it might do so by informing the development of syllabi that enact the modes of inclusion and critique promised in the development of the term queer. Bronski: Indeed, a great deal of class interest and discussion has concerned the queering of sex/gender roles in the past years, so much so that my syllabi that work best are the ones that bring queer theory to non-GLBTQ movies. In one class, “Beatniks, Hot Rods, and the Feminine Mystique: Sex and Gender in 1950s Films,” students seemed solely interested in looking through a queer lens. While this lens included, to varying degrees, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and (sometimes) Marxism, for the most part it excluded explicitly feminist theory (which the students viewed as old-fashioned and often repressive) and certain aspects of “cultural studies” that they thought was just so much “reading into” a movie. Moriel: In fact, feminist discourse, specifically Laura Mulvey’s theorizing about the male gaze, opened up the way for queer discourse, which asks other basic questions: which films are made and which are not, which characters are valorized and which marginalized, which themes are allowed and which are either silenced or distorted, and so on.11 Bronski: Students in “Beatniks, Hot Rods, and the Feminine Mystique” were happy to begin seeing All about Eve, Bell, Book, and Candle, and I Married a Monster from Outer Space as “queer” and did highly productive work under that rubric. My inclination is to say, however, that “queer theory” and “queer film studies” has been a terrific pedagogical tool for getting students excited about analyzing and exploring a wide range of themes in films, whether GLBTQ or non-GLBTQ, but that the excitement it generates often comes at the expense of equally useful modes of analysis. Grundmann: Yet queer media are indispensable to such pedagogical undertakings. They can amplify an insight that Michael Warner has in The Trouble with

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Normal — that every queer theory must reckon with gay history — to show that “queer” and “gay” are historically intertwined concepts.12 Their linkage plays out in numerous ways. For example, in a class in which I look at the history of gay and lesbian avant-garde media, a crucial lesson that emerges is the imbrication — indistinguishably queer and gay — of aesthetics and politics. In fact, in many ways aesthetic experimentation is in and of itself a political act: often it has helped convey sexual and bodily desires — perhaps most important, the queer practice of transforming one’s body and one’s desires into a work of art. In my position as a queer media pedagogue, I am often faced with such issues as how our media pedagogy might renew its commitment to the study of aesthetics without fostering an apolitical aestheticism, and how we can invigorate our students’ understanding and appreciation of all the radical aesthetic practices that run through our old and new works of queer literature and media. I’m not saying that answers to these complex questions are easily available. What emerges as we try to answer them, however, is the necessity of our remembering our history and our achievements. Moriel: In my own pedagogy I help students view cinema against the grain, asking other questions that cut to the core of whether what we see is a sleight of hand — the manipulation of the eye to move in one direction while other events or images are set in motion in another. For example, I once noticed that the narrative of Bonnie and Clyde did not compute as a heterosexual love story, given the way that the movie was marketed. Poking around as Vito Russo, my virtual pedagogical mentor, would have done, I discovered why and wrote a queer reading of the film for the Cambridge handbook.13 That the article appeared in a mainstream textbook about the film shows how far we have come in mainstreaming the marginal. Again, I think that this is a good thing so long as we keep the blade of criticism honed. Bronski: Yet insofar as students seem less interested in discussing film art or technique, I’ve often found doing that frustrating. My students seem happy to destabilize film and other media, but often not at all eager to analyze — to “read into” — and certainly not with a “political” agenda. So, ironically, as much as I am attached to “queering” the material, I’ve found myself slowly retreating from that position — with both the GLBTQ material and the non-GLBTQ material — because, rather than expand how we look at film, it has created a more narrow view.


Moriel: The problem, as I see it, is that in some ways queer criticism is becoming just another approach to visual language, just another class on the syllabus, and thus losing its importance as a cutting-edge tool for incisive analysis. If in the rush to tenure and approval we reshape our quest and make do with secondary survival maneuvers, the days of queer pedagogy are numbered. Ironically and paradoxically, our success can become our demise if we fail to take care of our core belief in the mutability and possibility of all things, ideas, approaches. If we codify our theory and teaching, we too will go the way of New Criticism. To keep our criticism, discipline, and theories fresh and relevant, we must constantly evolve; we must continue to question our premises, update our syllabi, and renew our thinking. Nair: Another approach to these problems is to consider the materiality of queer work outside the classroom. As someone who is also engaged in political activism, I have no desire to fetishize the work I do outside the academy or to romanticize it as more “authentic.” I do suggest, however, that we more consciously engage nonnormative readings and practices of queer film and media practices. “Queer” is increasingly read in terms of the inclusion of difference, but we ought instead to grapple with the critical work of, for instance, antiwar and sex work activists, who circulate the term differently — and aggressively and explosively — to question structures of power.14 Grundmann: One might also speak historiographically here by addressing the rift I mentioned between “gay” and “queer” that is reflected in, among other things, the glaring gap between the gay past and the queer present. In my opinion, this gap exists not simply because young queers seem to be the only ones who recognize many of the political exigencies of our time but, importantly, because a significant number of older queers — a whole generation of gay men — are no longer around to provide historical continuity. I am not saying that this generation was politicized down to its last member. What died with them, however, was a vast, and vastly significant, set of practices and knowledges that constituted a radical sociosexual experiment whose political potential could inspire queer life today. One of my most imperative tasks is thus to help compensate for this loss. For me, one of queer pedagogy’s ongoing projects must be to retrieve what once was radical about “gay” (before “gay” was hijacked by right-wingers and populists) and rearticulate it for current queer politics. This politics must become more flexible if it wants to intervene against neoliberalism’s reactionary nature while staying critically alert

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to the contradictions of the liberal environment (of politics, culture, and especially education) in which queerness itself moves. Ginsberg: To my mind, these concerns are symptomatic of political tensions and uncertainty over the future of GLBTQ film and media studies. Attacks on abortion rights, family planning, sex education, and HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, as well as attempts to install narrowly conceived Judeo-Christian values as a basis for legislative process and the conduct of everyday life (e.g., the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005), are hardly contradictory to their ostensible opposites in film and media culture. To reinvoke the all-but-forgotten Michel Foucault, current anti-GLBTQ initiatives are not a reactionary backlash enacted by persons resentful of what corporate and mainstream media have falsely presented as rampant GLBTQ sexual and economic “libertinism”; assaults on the advances that GLBTQ people have achieved collectively in economic equality and civil rights miss the overriding truth, elided by the media and many scholars, that most GLBTQ people still struggle on a daily basis for that modicum of dignity and respect withheld from them by a predominantly heteronormative society divided ideologically along lines of race, gender, nationality, generation, creed, and class. One need only refer to research on the increasingly marginalized status of lesbian professors to recognize just how misplaced claims to the contrary are.15 As the recent spate of public attacks on academic speech and free dissent, especially regarding U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East, demonstrates,16 conditions are ripe for ever more chilling, fear-inspiring campus atmospheres, which, to distract national attention from the horrors of expanding U.S. militarism in the context of an attenuated global economic crisis related to the continuing use of floating oil prices as a standard of monetary value, threaten to reverse the modest advances made by GLBTQ discourse and activism, not to mention discourage GLBTQ hires, GLBTQ curriculum development, and the publication of serious GLBTQ scholarship. Thompson: The results of the 2004 national elections, in which eleven states, including my own (Michigan), passed initiatives opposed to gay marriage and/or partnership benefits, also attest to the continued vulnerability of gay citizens and to the tenuous and indeed superficial dimensions of gay “mainstreaming.” That is, if gay marriage is such a contentious and deeply threatening issue to conservative Americans, then questions of citizenship (whether at the national or local level) and public utterances such as “I am a gay American” possess renewed pedagogical significance for classroom reading and discussions.


Nair: This brings me to another issue that has a bearing on queer pedagogy: the university and its reliance on contingent and underpaid labor. An account of queer pedagogy, especially in the already contentious and somewhat underfunded world of academic film and media, is incomplete if it does not contend with the forces that undermine the relevance of pedagogy itself. I am frustrated with queer theory’s persistent blindness to the deep inequalities of labor that pervade the very system that engendered queer theory and solidified its existence. As queer theorists and teachers, we see ourselves as insurgents within the university simply because we explicate — and take — positions on sex, gender, and sexuality. But our work is devoid of radical potential if it does not recognize that the conditions governing who gets to teach “queer” with more or less autonomy are utterly overdetermined by a system that perceives graduate students and adjuncts as the “waste product” of the university.17 We cannot congratulate ourselves for enabling queer pedagogy without critically examining what else “queer” must mean in relation to sexual, economic, and political control and surveillance. We risk losing the power to ask questions about power if we allow ourselves to be blinded by the love and tolerance of others that are often signified by limited struggles for marriage and related citizenship rights.

Notes 1. Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon, 2004). 2. David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 3. For a critique of the notion of diversity, especially in its structuring of higher education, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Diversity’s False Solace,” New York Times, April 11, 2004. 4. See Dana Seitler, “Queer Physiognomies; or, How Many Ways Can We Do the History of Sexuality?” Criticism 46 (2004): 71–102. 5. I thank Bill Dobbs for contributing this point. — YN 6. See Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 7. See the anthologies Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York: New York University Press, 2002), and Queer Diasporas, ed. Cindy Patton and Benigno SánchezEppler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 8. Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1970). 9. Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).

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10. Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). 11. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6 – 18. 12. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free, 1999). 13. Liora Moriel, “Erasure and Taboo: A Queer Reading of Bonnie and Clyde,” in Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” ed. Lester D. Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 148 – 76. 14. See Mattilda/Matt Bernstein Sycamore, ed., That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (New York: Soft Skull, 2005). 15. See Beth Mintz and Esther Rothblum, eds., Lesbians in Academia: Degrees of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1997). 16. See Scott Sherman, “The Mideast Comes to Columbia,” Nation, March 16, 2005. 17. Marc Bousquet, “The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible,” Social Text, no. 70 (2002): 81–104.