Queer European Cinema

Queering Cinematic Time and Space

Leanne Dawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351711579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Queer European Cinema commences with an overview of LGBTQ representation throughout cinematic history, interwoven with socio-political reality in Europe and beyond, to consider trends including the boarding school film, the gay road movie, and queer horror such as the lesbian vampire tale, before analysing case studies from the 'low culture' of pornography to the 'high culture' of arthouse cinema.

This collection of essays explores borders and boundaries of geography, temporality, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and desire in a range of European films at a time when both LGBTQ politics and the concept of Europe are under intense scrutiny in representation and reality, to demonstrate how LGBTQ film can serve as a political tool to create visibility and acceptance as well as providing entertainment.

Chapters include an analysis of both trans and femme identities in Academy Award-winning Boys Don't Cry alongside German film, Unveiled; the intersection of lesbian visibility and the notion of nation on the Croatian screen at its point of entry into the European Union and during the gay marriage referendum; music and its relation to camp in Italian transnational cinema; European lesbian feminist pornography; and an analysis of liminal spaces and citizenship in queer French-language road movies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in European Cinema.

Passing and policing: controlling compassion, bodies and boundaries in Boys Don’t Cry and Unveiled/Fremde Haut

Leanne Dawson

This article examines the cinematic representation of passing men, focusing on the underlying theme of cis male fear and the resulting policing of borders: bodily, geographical and social, employing queer theory (Butler; Halberstam) alongside the work of Foucault, to consider how power is articulated and policing is conducted in relation to the body and relationships. It commences with a reading trans tropes, before homing in on identity in relation to medium specificity to consider sight – the filmic gaze – alongside the sense of touch, then reading these aspects with the political reality of socio-economic position, queerness, crime and location. It then pulls back to consider representation, appropriation and arthouse film and culture to offer an interjection that reflects not only on fantasy and the cinematic screen, but also political reality.

Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce 1999) and Fremde Haut/Unveiled (Angelina Maccarone 2005), narrative feature films by lesbian independent filmmakers, follow ‘passing’ men who have also been read as enjoying lesbian sexual relations.¹ Academy Award-winning Boys Don’t Cry by American Pierce is an adaptation of the true story of murdered Brandon Teena, who is presented in the film as a trans man, although, like the aforementioned lesbianism, this reading of Brandon as trans is not unproblematic.^2,3 Key scenes from Pierce’s film can be examined alongside German director Maccarone’s Unveiled to consider how different types of trans masculinity are represented in Western patriarchal societies where white, heterosexual, cis men are intrinsically linked to power.^4,5Both protagonists suffer at the hands of cis men because of the supposed misalignment between their sex and gender and although this passes as an article on the cinematic representation of passing men, the underlying theme is fear and the resulting policing of borders: bodily, geographical and social.

After outlining some key theoretical concepts from Queer Studies, alongside Michel Foucault’s work on the development of Western systems of control, this article will consider how power is articulated and policing is conducted in relation to the body and relationships. This is done via a reading of trans tropes and some of the many similarities of the passing protagonists in Peirce and Maccarone’s films, for Unveiled appears to build on the groundwork laid by Boys Don’t Cry. This article then homes in on identity in relation to medium specificity to consider sight – the filmic gaze – alongside the sense of touch, before finally pulling back to read these aspects with the political reality of socio-economic position, queerness, crime and location.

Passing and policing

Passing is the misrecognition of a person as a member of a sociological group other than their own and can apply to aspects of identity such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion or disability status.⁶ Critical and social understanding of passing started with ethnicity: examples include light-skinned Black people posing as white in the racially segregated USA and Jews passing as ‘Aryan’ in Nazi Germany to escape persecution. The term has since become increasingly linked to sexuality and gender: used as shorthand for passing as straight with regard to gay men and lesbians who wish to keep their sexual orientation private or simply choose to dress and act in a way that is often erroneously considered to be heterosexual. It is also used by transgender people as a strategy either to avoid negative attention or punishment for their supposed gender transgressions or out of a belief that they should be read externally in line with what they consider to be their internal gender identity.⁷ By its very definition, when certain people ‘pass’, others ‘fail’ (Bernstein Sycamore 2006, 2) and it is those who either cannot or choose not to pass, and therefore present a disruptive surface text, who have been most celebrated in queer theory, despite the fact that failing to pass can have serious socio-political consequences. Furthermore, the sometime dismissal of passing in queer theory may fail to acknowledge its use as a means of infiltration and, possibly, covert power. While Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry appears to strive to pass, ironically, because he is presented as believing he is a man, the passing in Unveiled is part of a more fluid gender display, apparently due to other external factors regarding the liminal space of (homo)sexuality and asylum.

There are temporal, cultural and geographical ‘norms’ of gender and other aspects of identity, which are often incorrectly considered to be inherent or natural. Simone de Beauvoir examined the binary, which places the most powerful or normative identity in the first position, and relegates the other to second position e.g. subject–object, man–woman, Aryan–Jewish, white–black and her seminal 1949 statement, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman’ ([1949] 1997, 249) is an insight into gender as a process, a socialisation into such otherness, which inspired second-wave feminism in the 1970s. Seminal queer theory text, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler [1990] 1999) built on this to unsettle established notions of gender identity, subjectivity and human agency by emphasising the body as discursive surface: gender performativity involves repetitive actions of movement, gesture, posture, labour, dress, production, interaction with objects and the manipulation of space, giving the illusionary appearance that gender is inherent. Butler uses the butch-femme lesbian couple to illuminate issues surrounding sex, gender and sexuality, reflected in the ideas about passing earlier:

The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of ‘the original’ […] reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original. ([1990] 1999, 41)

Butler stresses the political significance of displacing traditional heterosexual practices of masculinity and femininity from their supposedly natural home on the heterosexual couple’s bodies to the lesbian couple’s bodies, and rightly argues that not just lesbian, but all identities, must be challenged. She distinguishes performance in the more literal, theatrical sense from performativity, as the former is a ‘bounded act’ with a demarcated beginning and end (1993, 234), taking the aforementioned socio-political reality into consideration:

gender performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly punitive and regulatory social conventions. Indeed, the sight of the transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence. (1988, 527)

The fact that the main characters in both films pass as men as part of their daily reality, rather than for entertainment, throws their respective environments into disarray, for gender intelligibility and unintelligibility are frequently linked to power – more so for intelligible masculinity – and powerlessness, respectively.⁸

Language, too, plays a key role in identity, ‘The doctor who receives the child and pronounces – “It’s a girl” – begins that long string of interpellations by which the girl is transitively girled’ (Butler 1997, 49). For Butler, language is ‘a performance with effects’ (1997, 7) and ‘to move out of the domain of speakability is to risk one’s status as a subject’ (1997, 133), an issue which the trans characters in both films must navigate, as well as being significant off-screen with naming and labels so interwoven in the social fabric that divides were created between camps (trans, lesbian etc.) who wish to appropriate and claim Brandon as one of them. Butler’s work is deeply informed by Foucault, a scholar of historiography and archives of power, whose research examines the development of Western systems of control that makes humans subjects and he goes beyond biology to consider the body as a manipulated and controlled object. In power relations, sexuality is one of the elements with the ‘greatest instrumentality’ ([1976] 1998, 103), with non-normative sexuality frequently pathologised ([1976] 1998, 105). Foucault outlines how sex/uality has been unspeakable, silenced ([1976] 1998, 6) or that which must be confessed, to a religious leader or on the psychoanalyst’s sofa ([1976] 1998, 59), instances of testimony to powerful subjects who listen and say little, therefore knowing without revealing (Foucault [1976] 1998, 62). These also speak to subjects as a means of categorizing, regulating and policing norms and behaviours, although Butler is less damning here, considering the positives for the subject of these confessions e.g. the religious follower feeling closer to God and the analysand resolving issues (2004, 164–165). Indeed Foucault singled out doctors, prison staff, priests, judges and psychiatrists as key figures in political configurations involving domination. In order to instill discipline, the prison, the factory and suchlike provide enclosure and partitioning, assign rank, make a clear timetable and push for the correct use of the body ensuring it does not remain idle (Foucault [1975] 1991, 141–154), so the docile body of the factory worker and the prisoner follows routine and order (Foucault: 137–138). Furthermore, these institutions have traditionally been controlled by straight, white, cis men and contained those on the second position of the binary, or outside of the supposed norm: criminals, people of colour, the poor, queers, etc.

Aforementioned institutions such as the prison and the hospital employ medical and other examinations, transforming ‘the economy of visibility into the exercise of power’ (Foucault [1975] 1991, 184), and visibility is imperative, too, when considering the medium of film. Since Laura Mulvey’s seminal article on scopophilia and film, in which she theorised that the spectator’s ‘gaze’ is always ‘male’, regardless of gender, and woman onscreen is a spectacle of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (1975, 14) to be enjoyed by this ‘male gaze’, film scholars have theorised numerous gazes. Queer theorist Halberstam uses Boys Don’t Cry to posit a trans gaze linked to queer temporality as, ‘queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction’ (2005, 1) and thus do not adhere to the linearity and repetition of a normative life schedule i.e. those with ‘queer’ lifestyles, even if their gender and sexuality are hetero-normative, such as drug addicts and club kids who live life in ‘rapid bursts’ (Halberstam 2005, 4).⁹ Indeed Halberstam claims Peirce’s film constructs ‘a transgender gaze capable of seeing through the present to a future elsewhere’ (2005, 7), beyond patriarchy’s fixation on linearity and the binary.

In order to explore trans tropes in both films, some plot detail is necessary. In Boys Don’t Cry, 21-year-old Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank), assigned female at birth, leaves his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska after problems with male authority figures: the police, angry patriarchs and other male family members of his ex-girlfriends.¹⁰ When he has to move out of his gay cousin Lonny’s (Matt McGrath) trailer park home, he heads to a bar, where he meets a girl named Candace (Alicia Goranson) and accepts an invitation to a party in her hometown of Falls City.¹¹ He creates a new life for himself there, sharing the limited leisure and social activities open to those portrayed as uneducated, uncultured and relatively poor, primarily involving alcohol, violence and cars, while charming women, including Candace’s sister Lana Tisdel (Chloë Sevigny), with whom he enters into a relationship.¹² His past, criminal and gender-related – both of which are heavily policed – catches up with him when his birthname, Teena Brandon, is listed in a local newspaper in relation to one of his crimes. Although Brandon claims this is a typographical error, suspicions had already been aroused and he is humiliated, beaten and raped by local men Tom (Brendan Sexton III) and John (Peter Sarsgaard), before being killed by the latter.

Unveiled (2005) follows Iranian Fariba Tabrizi (Jasmin Tabatabai), who flees to Germany because of homophobic treatment in her homeland, where she had been having an affair with a married woman. She claims asylum for ‘political reasons’, fearful of the officials’ response to her same-sex relationship for she was mistreated by Iranian authorities in another example of the unethical policing of sexuality. She is housed in a closed reception centre at a German airport, where she befriends a man (Navíd Akhavan), who is fleeing their shared homeland due to repercussions from student political activity, and who is granted temporary asylum but commits suicide. With her asylum denied, Fariba secretly buries his body and assumes his identity: Siamak Mustafai.¹³ Fariba, passing as Siamak, is transported to Sielmingen, Swabia where s/he shares a small bedroom with a man presented as foreign and works, illegally, in a Sauerkraut factory.¹⁴ A dare sees work colleague Anne (Anneke Kim Samau) ask Siamak out and their gentle friendship transforms into a lesbian relationship, passing as heterosexual to everyone else diegetically, with Siamak/Fariba’s ethnic and cultural difference considered responsible for Fariba/Siama...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Queer European Cinema: queering cinematic time and space
• 1. Passing and policing: controlling compassion, bodies and boundaries in Boys Don’t Cry and Unveiled/Fremde Haut
• 2. Concealing, revealing, and coming out: lesbian visibility in Dalibor Matanić’s Fine Dead Girls and Dana Budisavljević’s Family Meals
• 3. Loose cannons unloaded. Popular music, space, and queer identities in the films of Ferzan Özpetek
• 4. The ethics of shared embodiment in queer, feminist and lesbian pornography
• 5. Crossing borders and queering identities in French-language European road cinema
• Index