Queer Screen Cultures

University of Nottingham
5 May 2009

“Queer Screen Cultures” was an interdisciplinary postgraduate study day held at the University of Nottingham on May 5th 2009 in association with the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network. It was devised with the aim of bringing together researchers from across the UK who deal with issues of queer visibility and representation, and so making links across the disciplines and across the academic spectrum.

There has been a perceptible alteration in media representations of queer sexualities since the 1990s, on a global scale. The cultural visibility of queers has increased exponentially, with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters now routinely populating film, television and other digital media, and the mainstream press frequently covering gay and lesbian stories as a matter of course. This interdisciplinary event seeks to explore representations and negotiations of queerness in contemporary screen cultures, as well as their determinants, in addition to interrogating recent queer readings and “reclamations” of earlier screen texts. Supporting scholars from film and media studies, sociology, politics and cultural studies among other disciplines, the event covered a number of themes and issues pertaining to on screen queer visibility including:

  • Cultural mainstreaming and the political contexts of queer visibility;
  • Film-making and queer aesthetics;
  • Queer audiences and participatory cultures: for example, L Word theme parties;
  • On-screen intersections of queerness and other identities: gender, ethnicity, etc;
  • Queer “reclamations” of ostensibly non-queer films, television programmes, and other texts;
  • “Textual poaching,” queer appropriations and slash fictions;
  • Queer adaptations;
  • Trans and genderqueer visibility: representations and marginalisation;
  • National and regional queer identities in cinema and media;
  • The impact of digitisation and the multi-platform environment on queer visibility;
  • Internet technologies and queer self-fashioning: YouTube and other online broadcasting.

Gary Needham of Nottingham Trent University, author of the forthcoming Queer TV, and Dr Michele Aaron of the University of Birmingham, editor of New Queer Cinema, delivered the plenary lectures. There was also a roundtable discussion which brought together both speakers and delegates to debate ‘the cultural mainstreaming of queerness.’

> Access the 'Queer Screen Cultures' website for the details, programme and abstracts of the event