Taking Back Desire: Queerness and Neoliberalism in New Aesthetic Forms of Contemporary Moving Image Cultures

Abstract

Whilst much queer theory since the 1990s has sought to problematise the concept of identity, the most widely accepted definition of ‘queerness’ currently circulating in Western popular culture is nevertheless as a designation of gender and sexual identities that do not conform to heterosexual and cisgender norms. As this uptake of queer has sought to extend social recognition to sexual and gender minorities, identity as a category has increasingly taken on the function of a commodity – and queer is no exception here. This commodification of queerness emerges out of a neoliberal emphasis on a reified individualism, contrasting with queer theory’s ‘negative turn’ away from the premise that it is inclusion within existing structures, which serves a conventional heterosexual majority, that should be the primary political focus for people historically rejected by the dominant culture. In response to the contemporary ways queerness-as-identity has been consolidated by neoliberalism, this thesis studies a range of film, television and video art texts to restore a sense of queer as troubling identity. The two texts that have been typically cited as having introduced queer theory’s rejection of the desire for social acceptability are Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) and Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Together, these psychoanalytically informed interventions have been credited with announcing the ‘negative’ shift away from the politics of inclusion, situating queerness instead as a structural outlier to norms rather than a sexual orientation that mainstream culture should accept. However, neither Bersani nor Edelman address neoliberalism or the question of how queerness might problematise contemporary forms of capitalism. Drawing from film scholarship, Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as queer theory, this project proposes that we read queerness against the logic of neoliberal capitalism and thus refuse an assimilation into its regimes of performative diversity. Key thinkers cited throughout this thesis include Edelman, Todd McGowan, and Joan Copjec. McGowan and Copjec may not engage with queer theory directly, yet their Lacanian understandings of subjectivity and language inform how this project approaches desire, and McGowan’s analysis of capitalism is returned to throughout to examine the social and psychic operations of neoliberalism. Each chapter pairs a concept from Lacanian psychoanalysis with selected moving image works to offer readings of concrete manifestations of the otherwise abstract notions of queerness and neoliberalism. Chapter One examines the television series Pose (2018-2021) and its documentary precursor Paris Is Burning (1990). By introducing the Lacanian order of the ‘real’, I establish how representation, narrative and themes of embodiment create divergent understandings of queer, which this thesis takes forward into the following chapters. Chapter Two turns to the neo-noir miniseries Sharp Objects (2018) to ask how temporal disorder redefines meaning in the narrative and visual field, and how temporality relates to genre, Lacan’s theory of sexual difference, consumerism, and Whiteness as a historical category. Chapter Three considers Lacanian scholarship on enjoyment to examine the staging of reality television in Ryan Trecartin’s video installation Priority Innfield (2013) and the ways this emulation of genre comes into tension with queerness, read as an overabundance and disorderly manifestation of signification. The final chapter analyses the independent feature film 120 BPM (2017), a historical drama about Parisian ACT UP activists during the 1990s. The chapter relates the strobe lighting featured in the film to Lacan’s theory of the drive, proposing that negative space on screen suggests how queerness draws attention to the limits of signification and the political implications of this gesture.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	David Alderson (Supervisor) & Jacqueline Stacey (Supervisor)