10.8: Deep Dive - Books and Film

Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Established in 1976, this peer-reviewed journal is a mainstay for scholarship in the areas of media studies and audiovisual culture examined from feminist and queer perspectives. It is published by Duke University Press. Camera Obscura has published or republished groundbreaking articles. B. Ruby Rich, an influential LGBTQ+ film studies theorist, serves on its editorial advisory board. Browse the journal at https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura.

The Celluloid Closet, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

This film is based on the LGBTQ+ activist and film historian Vito Russo’s classic 1981 (revised edition 1987) book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. It provides an overview of LGBTQ+ depictions from the silent era to films of the early 1990s. Including footage from over 120 films, as well as interviews with directors and actors, this documentary was the first of its kind in examining LGBTQ+ representations in popular, mainstream film with such scope. Like the book on which it is based, it uncovers sometimes surprising early depictions of homosexuality in film and analyzes the historical development of queer representations in relation to motion picture industry censorship known as the Hays Code and the Production Code (United States: Sony Pictures Classics, 1995).

The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, by Vito Russo

This classic work in LGBTQ+ film studies was first published in 1981. Russo, a prominent LGBTQ+ activist and film historian, covers the visibility of LGBTQ+ characters and themes in Hollywood cinema from the silent era to the 1980s. In 1995, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman directed a now-classic documentary film of the same title based on his work. This documentary picks up where Russo left off and includes early-1990s films such as Thelma and Louise (rev. ed.; New York: Harper and Row, 1987).

Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema, directed by Lisa Ades and Lesli Klainberg

Covering mainstream and indie cinema’s LGBTQ+ landmarks, such as Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991) and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), this 2006 documentary provides analysis and interviews of the depictions and representations of LGBTQ+ experiences and communities in the United States. Fabulous! is often described as the descendant of the classic documentary The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies but with a focus on queer cinema rather than on LGBTQ+ representations in mainstream, mostly heteronormative cinema. Though not unanimously well reviewed, it provides a look that is hard to find elsewhere at late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century popular queer cinema (United States: Orchard Films and Independent Film Company, 2006).

New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut, by B. Ruby Rich

Rich, a professor in the Film and Digital Media Department and director of the Social Documentation Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a key scholar in the field of LGBTQ+ media criticism. She created the genre term new queer cinema in 1992 to describe the directions LGBTQ+ cinema was moving and how it differed from the past aesthetically and politically. This work provides access to many of her seminal past publications and to newer material. She covers LGBTQ+ film festivals, the landscape of queer cinema, and important contributors to the genre, including Todd Haynes, Derek Jarman, Julián Hernández, and Ang Lee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

Queer Cinema and Visual Culture, by K. J. Surkan

This MIT OpenCourseWare offering from 2017 includes readings, films, and assignments and analyzes post–World War II cinema through the lens of queer theory (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/womens-and-gender-studies/wgs-181-queer-cinema-and-visual-culture-fall-2017/).

The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom, by Tison Pugh

Pugh, professor of English at the University of Central Florida, investigates heteronormative sitcoms, such as Leave It to Beaver, and contemporary sitcoms featuring LGBTQ+ characters, such as Modern Family. He analyzes homophobia, the sexualization of girls, and gay stereotypes. This is an open-access text (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017, https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/33010).

Transgender Cinema, by Rebecca Bell-Metereau

Bell-Metereau provides a history of depictions of transgender people from the silent era through the present in documentaries, classic and cult feature films, television, and world cinema. She examines these representations and their effects on both popular understandings of transgender people and transgender people’s self-image. There are few recent, book-length, scholarly treatments of transgender cinema with this scope. This work fills a gap in LGBTQ+ media criticism, which often focuses on sexual orientation more than on gender identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019).