Queer Cinema ─ The Film Reader

Queer Cinema, The Film Reader examines the relationship between cinematic representations of sexuality and their social, historical, and industrial contexts.

Clearly divided into an introductory overview and four topic areas, the Reader explores how recent critical thinking has approached queer sexualities in relation to the cinema. The four sections discuss:

• Authorship - examining the role of sexuality in the work of queer filmmakers such as George Cukor, Dorothy Arzner, Barbara Hammer, and the directors of New Queer Cinema
• Forms - exploring how genres such as the horror film, the musical, film noir, and the animated film construct queer cinematic spaces
• Camp - looking at how this reception strategy and mode of textual production, initially practised by pre-Stonewall queers, retains its critical charge even in contemporary mainstream popular culture
• Reception - considering three specific historical case-studies of how queer fans have interacted with media texts from Judy Garland to Star Trek.

The Reader concludes with an essay that queerly rethinks classical gaze theory and allows students and scholars of the subject to draw their own conclusions in their studies.

Harry M. Benshoff is an Assistant Professor in Radio, Television and Film at the University of North Texas. He is the author of Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester University Press, 1997) and co-author (with Sean Griffin) of America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies (Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming, 2004)
Dr. Sean Griffin is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Cinema-Television at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out (NYU Press, 2000), and co-author (with Harry M. Benshoff) of America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies (Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming, 2004).