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

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.  

. 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.  

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. 

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 

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 

 At the same time, gay marriage was neither desirable nor available, let alone legalized, trans identities and stories were not yet emergent, and gay white men still dominated queer crossover culture 

works of film and video feature length and short, experimenting with narrative and gut-punching in message, excited the communities of ... and they proceeded to break out and make an impact on the world at large via film festivals, art-house release, and, eventually, mainstream crossover.  

The New Queer Cinema comprised works that would become important objects for the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, both attracting congressional condemnation and mobilizing support for a new vision of a queer culture that would shift attitudes forever. 

• The new queer films and videos arent all the same, and dont share a single aesthetic vocabulary or strategy or concern . Yet they are nonetheless united by a common style 

• There are traces in all of them appropriation and patiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind