After the New Queer Cinema: Intersectionality vs. Fascism B Ruby Rich

n intersectional cinematic practice may involve switching gazes into new places or upgrading representational aesthetics for a more inclusive lens; other times, it may simply deliver new subjects for attention. 

Cinema and media can no longer be about the self, however exceptional; can no longer begin and end at the body, the epidermal, the haptic, even the merely representational. Rather, they must be intersectional. 

what this atomization would do to notions of community and to any surviving sense of solidarity across lines of race or class, not to mention the threat to queer lmmaker livelihoods long facilitated by screening rentals and festival sale 

 the rise of individualism and the fracturing of society fostered by this move to individuated consumption 

I began to worry, often out loud in lectures, about the disappearance of the “public” that had shaped me and been paramount to experiencing a sense of community for generations.  

No longer was new queer work necessarily playing to audiences gathered en masse as a community to be validated together by images onscreen or challenged by narratives of provocation, as had been the case for so long 

So much queer work was produced in the rst two decades of the new century that it constituted a veritable queer renaissance, featuring contributions from around the world and a burgeoning creativity that has not slowed down, both mainstream or alternative, with a huge number of lmmakers who have risen to prominence in the new millennium, won

One landmark moment was the release and consequent acclaim for Ang Lee’s shattering Brokeback Mountain (2005), an artistic and commercial success...—that rebranded the New Queer Cinema as a genre available to anyone of any sexual identity with the requisite artistry and empathy 

. It was a world where queer publics were palpable and visible, queer pop-culture arrivals were massive subcultural events, and everything seemed to be transpiring for the very first time.