Rituels Queer

The emergence of young generation filmmakers who are more confident in depicting gender and sexual issues after the Soeharto era (1998), significantly changes the construction of sexual diversity in 2003—2006 Indonesian films. One of the considerable phenomena is the personal experience and social commitment to support sexual minorities such as gay and lesbian issues. At the same time Indonesian queer communities strive to read the discourse of homosexuality in different way. Physical contact and even intimacy between persons of the same-sex, in both public and private spaces, was common practice in Indonesian cultures, and did not carry any suggestion of homoerotic desire. In this Riri Riza’s film, Soe Hok Gie, however, cinematic technique, narrative and dialogue all contribute to an eroticising of samesex relationships that is particularly perceptible in cultures that previously regarded physical and emotional interactions between persons of the same-sex as unremarkable. This article based on Benshoff and Griffin’s (2006) theory on queer film.

Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender, Art. Routledge/Taylor & Francis 2015, 2015

Journal of Film and Video, 2018

gender forum, 2016

Frederic Rukes was the guest editor for the gender forum issue 59 Queer Film and Television.

A Companion to Chinese Cinema, 2013

A cursory view of Gay films and their importance..

2024

Primarily through the lens of films (shorts, feature, documentary, and digital) and touching upon visual arts and music, we will explore the field of queer studies and its relationship both to the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people and to understandings of broader culture and society. Using interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate the intersection of race, class, gender, ability, and nation with sexuality and gender identity and expression, we will cultivate analytical tools provided by queer and trans studies and apply them to artistic and cultural production and expression, as well as related political and social contexts. In this introductory course, students need no prior background in queer/trans studies, women’s and gender studies, or film studies to fully engage.

On May 24, 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) (1919), “arguably the first feature film with an explicitly homosexual theme” premiered at the Apollo Theater in Berlin (Steakley 1999). The film, directed by Richard Oswald in collaboration with sexologist Magnus Hirschfield, depicted a gay relationship between a violinist and his male student and aimed to educate audiences on both the medical legitimacy of homosexuality and the legal discrimination facing homosexual males under Germany’s Paragraph 175. The controversial Different from the Others was soon banned, however, when censorship was reinstated in Germany in 1920. Relegated to Hirschfeld’s archive where its various prints were likely destroyed when the Nazis rose to power, the film exists today as a single fragment. Since, activists, archivists, historians, and film scholars have returned to the extant fragment of Different from the Others in attempt to excavate and historically reconstruct its homosexual content. This essay approaches Different from the Others as a queer, material trace of Weimar sexual culture that resists dominant, seemingly neutral modes archiving and historical reconstruction. The first half of the article examines the instability and difficult-to-define nature of the homosexuality depicted in the original Weimar film. I argue that the educative narrative reflects German efforts to understand male homosexuality legally and socially in a modernizing nation. I then move to investigate how Richard Dyer’s foundational reading of the film in his 1990 Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film, Filmmuseum München’s 1999 reconstruction of the film, and LGBT organization Outfest/UCLA’s recent reconstruction-in-progress inevitably engage and resist an imaginative desire for a contemporary LGBTQ “origin” in the fragmented film. Investigating these recent processes surrounding Different from the Others, I argue that the ephemerality of the film is a crucial part of its material and representational significance as an archived queer narrative, past and present.