Queering Visual Cultures

Ed. Subashish Bhattacharjee

The contemporary popular cultural space has leveraged the queer in the same format of representation as its presentation in the 1990s. Although the queer is portrayed in a less perverse light than a decade ago, popular cultural representations of the queer in the visual culture genres are still on the level of the banal. While popular culture has become more encouraging towards the queer, the broader cultural opinion about the queer has been progressively more skeptical, compromised by the idea that the queer is encroaching on spaces reserved exclusively for heteronormative recreation.

The essays in this volume look closely at how the queer is portrayed across media and throughout the world. It is imperative that analyses of popular cultural depictions and presentations of the queer are performed with the extensive intent towards encouraging a politics of inclusion and towards deterring the abjection of the queer subject in popular cultural portrayals.

Placing Visual Cultures in a Queer Context – Subashish Bhattacharjee; Queeerness and the Limits of Criticism in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac — William J. Simmons; Queering Yerevan—Politics of Location: A Feminist Material Analysis of Dis/Orientations of Self-Defined Artistic Labour — Elke Krasny; The Visual Representation of Queer Bollywood: Mistaken Identities and Misreadings in Dostana – Rohit K. Dasgupta; Mobbing, Bullying, and the Queer Victim in Slasher Films from the 1980s – Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Canela Ailen Rodriguez Fontao and Mariana Zárate; ‘Gross Indecency’: Depicting Oscar Wilde on Stage — Argha Bannerjee; “Just Say Yes”: Queer Theatrical Portrayals of AIDS and the Rejection of Safer Sex – Lara S. Narcisi; Performing Queer Identities and Mainstreaming Gay Culture in Glee — Fanny Beuré; 1980—The Year to Fear the Queer: Violent Responses to Patriarchy and Gender-bending in Cruising and Dressed to Kill — David Klein Martins; “So you Thought we would Go away?”: Confronting Shaming in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour — Anna Fahråeus; Coming Together: Pride and Queer Social Realism — Florian Zitzelsberger