Queer Cinema and the Nothing

Queerness, it is often affirmed, does not name any thing or identity: inherently “catachrestic,” it names what does not fit, the no-thing that undoes the stability of established norms. In this talk, I consider queer cinema as a cinema concerned with the form of the nothing. This nothing might appear via the trope of the desert that interrupts and negates the bourgeois family drama in Pasolini’s Teorema or Akerman’s No Home Movie; or as the “underperformed emotion [and] flat affect” that Lauren Berlant associated with a “cluster of queer films from the mid-1980s onwards.” But the nothing in queer cinema is also, conversely, a point of affective condensation, that inheres in the converging violences—homo and/or transphobic, psychological, social, epidemiological, and racial—that find expression through the generic forms of melodrama or tragedy, for example in films by Fassbinder or Haynes. Emerging out of these European and North American traditions of queer cinema, this talk examines the constructive and de(con)structive force of the nothing in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002), part of his so-called “Death Trilogy,” a film in which two white college bros wander through the desert. Cinema here reveals its queer affinity for the deathly reduction or expansion of space and time, and poses the question, both existential and political, of what it means to stay attached to life in the face of the annihilating forces that seem to negate it at every turn. 

Damon R. Young is associate professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Duke, 2018, shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize), as well as numerous essays on film theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, pornography and digital media. He is co-editor, most recently of Meme Aesthetics, a special issue of Representations, and his current book project, Century of the Selfie, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

Contact information

Kanika Lawton, Cinema Studies Institute and Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
Avneet Sharma, Cinema Studies Institute and Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

Acknowledgments

This event is organized by the Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group on Queer & Trans Negativity. Sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute, the University of Toronto Graduate Students' Union, and the Cinema Studies Institute. Hosted by the Jackman Humanities Institute.