New Queer Images

Since the early 1980s, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of international gay/lesbian-themed visual productions, ranging from pornographic images and television programmes to advertising and graphic novels. Often originating from countries with a multicultural tradition (most notably Great Britain and the United States), this cultural phenomenon has now reached many territories, including the French-speaking world.
What are the thematic and aesthetic convergences/divergences of such visual productions? Do such works develop problematics and approaches specific to areas such as metropolitan France or French-speaking Canada? The eleven essays included in this collection (two in English and nine in French) aim to answer these questions by offering in-depth and challenging discussions of various queer-themed visual productions made in a contemporary Francophone context. Each contribution focuses on specific case studies drawn from auteur, pornographic and experimental cinemas, as well as those based on analyses of images from television, printed media and contemporary art.

Florian Grandena is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication of the University of Ottawa, where he teaches film studies. He is the author of many articles on French queer cinema and a book on new French political cinema entitled Showing the World to the World: Political Fictions in French Cinema of the 1990s and Early 2000s (2008). He is also the initiator of a cycle of conferences on gay/lesbian hypervisibility in contemporary Francophone visual cultures.
Cristina Johnston is a Lecturer in French and Visual Cultures in the School of Languages, Cultures and Religions at the University of Stirling. She has published articles on sexuality in contemporary French cinema, transatlantic cinematic relations and French Republican citizenship in the post-PACS era, and the monograph French Minority Cinema (2010).