This book explores how young Cuban filmmakers have expanded the range of sexual subjectivities on screen. It analyzes cine joven (films made by young directors) from the late 1980s to the early 2020s, film reviews, articles, and materials from the Cinematheque of Cuba's archive to illustrate the confluence of sexuality, cinema, and discourses of youth. While sexual and cinematic cultures have their own unique relation to the public sphere, state institutions, and transnational flows, this book explores tensions, debates, and expressions that unite them. In an investigation of how young filmmakers employ queer strategies of self-making to bring sexual diversity to the screen, Margaret G. Frohlich shows us how cine joven takes part in the socialization of power in Cuba.
2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Despite All Adversities examines a representative selection of notable queer films by Spanish America's most important directors since the 1950s. Each chapter focuses on a single film and offers rich and thoughtful new interpretations by a prominent scholar. The book explores films from across the region, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's and Juan Carlos Tabío's Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), Marcelo Piñeyro's Plata quemada (Burnt Money, 2000), Barbet Schroeder's La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins, 2000), Lucía Puenzo's XXY (XXY, 2007), Francisco J. Lombardi's No se lo digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone, 1998), Arturo Ripstein's El lugar sin límites (Hell Without Limits, 1978), among others. A survey of recent lesbian-themed Mexican films is also included.
Powerfully posing questions of ethics, ideology, authorship and form, documentary film has never been more popular than it is today. Edited by one of the leading British authorities in the field, The Documentary Film Book is an essential guide to current thinking on documentary film. In a series of fascinating essays, key international experts discuss the theory of documentary, outline current understandings of its history (from pre-Flaherty to the post-Griersonian world of digital 'i-Docs'), survey documentary production (from Africa to Europe, and from the Americas to Asia), consider documentaries by marginalised minority communities, and assess its contribution to other disciplines and arts. Brought together here in one volume, these scholars offer compelling evidence as to why, over the last few decades, documentary has come to the centre of screen studies.
Cuba’s Gay Revolution explores the unique health-based approach that was employed in Cuba to dramatically change attitudes and policies regarding sexual diversity (LGBTQ) since 1959. It examines leaders in the process to normalize sexual diversity, such as the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) and the National Center of Sexual Education (CENESEX). This book is written for scholars interested in LGBTQ issues, Cuba, and Latin America.
Explores the rich and varied LGBT cinema and television of Mexico since the new millennium. Queer Mexico: Cinema and Television since 2000provides critical analysis of both mainstream and independent audiovisual works, many of them little known, produced in Mexico since the turn of the twenty-first century. In the book, author Paul Julian Smith aims to tease out the symbiotic relationship between culture and queerness in Mexico. Smith begins with the year 2000 because of the political shift that happened within the government—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted out of national office after over seventy years in power. Judicial and social changes for LGBT Mexicans came in the wake of what was known at the time as simply "the change" ("el cambio") at the start of the millennium, bringing about an increased visibility and acknowledgment of the LGBT community. Divided into five chapters, Queer Mexico demonstrates the diversity of both representation and production processes in the Mexican film and television industry. It attempts also to reconstruct a queer cultural field for Mexico that incorporates multiple genres and techniques. The first chapter looks at LGBT festivals, porn production, and a web-distributed youth drama, claimed by its makers to be the first wholly gay series made in Mexico. The second chapter examines selected features and shorts by Mexico's sole internationally distributed art house director, Julián Hernández. The third chapter explores the rising genre of documentary on transgender themes. The fourth chapter charts the growing trend of a gay, lesbian, or trans-focused mainstream cinema. The final chapter addresses the rich and diverse history of queer representation in Mexico's dominant television genre and, arguably, national narrative: the telenovela. The book also includes an extensive interview with gay auteur Julián Hernández. The first book to come out of the Queer Screens series, Queer Mexicois a groundbreaking monograph for anyone interested in media or LGBT studies, especially as it relates to the culture of Latin America.
In Fidel between the Lines Laura-Zoë Humphreys traces the changing dynamics of criticism and censorship in late socialist Cuba through a focus on cinema. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban state strategically relaxed censorship, attempting to contain dissent by giving it an outlet in the arts. Along with this shift, foreign funding and digital technologies gave filmmakers more freedom to criticize the state than ever before, yet these openings also exacerbated the political paranoia that has long shaped the Cuban public sphere. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and archival research, Humphreys shows how Cuban filmmakers have historically turned to allegory to communicate an ambivalent relationship to the Revolution, and how such efforts came up against new forms of suspicion in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Offering insights that extend beyond Cuba, Humphreys reveals what happens to public debate when freedom of expression can no longer be distinguished from complicity while demonstrating the ways in which combining anthropology with film studies can shed light on cinema's broader social and political import.
What is the child for Latin American cinema? This book aims to answer that question, tracing the common tendencies of the representation of the child in the cinema of Latin American countries, and demonstrating the place of the child in the movements, genres and styles that have defined that cinema. Deborah Martin combines theoretical readings of the child in cinema and culture, with discussions of the place of the child in specific national, regional and political contexts, to develop in-depth analyses and establish regional comparisons and trends. She pays particular attention to the narrative and stylistic techniques at play in the creation of the child's perspective, and to ways in which the presence of the child precipitates experiments with film aesthetics. Bringing together fresh readings of well-known films with attention to a range of little-studied works, The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema examines films from the recent and contemporary period, focussing on topics such as the death of the child in ‘street child’ films, the role of the child in post-dictatorship filmmaking and the use of child characters to challenge gender and sexual ideologies. The book also aims to place those analyses in a historical context, tracing links with important precursors, and paying attention to the legacy of the child’s figuring in the mid-century movements of melodrama and the New Latin American Cinema.
Throughout the 1960s until her untimely death in 1974, Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez engaged directly and courageously with the social, political, economic, and cultural transformations promised by the Cuban Revolution. Gómez directed numerous documentary films in 10 prolific years. She also made De cierta manera (One way or another), her only feature-length film. Her films navigate complex experiences of social class, race, and gender by reframing revolutionary citizenship, cultural memory, and political value. Not only have her inventive strategies become foundational to new Cuban cinema and feminist film culture, but they also continue to inspire media artists today who deal with issues of identity and difference. The Cinema of Sara Gómez assembles history, criticism, biography, methodology, and theory of Gómez's work in scholarly writing; interviews with friends and collaborators; the film script of De cierta manera; and a detailed and complete filmography. Featuring striking images, this anthology reorients how we tell Cuban cinema history and how we think about the intersections of race, gender, and revolution. By addressing Gómez's entire body of work, The Cinema of Sara Gómez unpacks her complex life and gives weight to her groundbreaking cinema.
This dissertation examines the relation of national identity to sexual identity in contemporary Hispanic novels and films of a lesbian theme. This diverse array of narratives echo each other in many key ways and share in common an historical stage in which national boundaries are in flux. Associated with waves of immigration and globalized economies, these fluctuations call into question the essential quality of other social identifications, such as gender and sexuality. The novels selected for this dissertation highlight the difficulties of affirming a marginalized identity in this context without repeating the same modes of exclusion that characterize marginalizing power relations.
The history of same-sex attraction and love is relevant to many aspects of history, including its social, religious, and political dimensions. The Historical Dictionary of Homosexuality provides a comprehensive survey of same-sex relations from ancient China and Greece to the contemporary world. The book covers religious traditions that have tolerated or had a role for same-sex relations, to those that have condemned it and called for punishment. The legal treatment of homosexuality, and the development in the modern world of a gay rights movements, are central areas of focus. In addition, there are a number of entries for specific countries and regions that provides concise summaries of how same-sex relations have been understood and treated around the globe. Court decisions and emerging norms in international law are also covered. Historical Dictionary of Homosexuality, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 200 cross-referenced entries on important historical figures, philosophic, artistic, and literary treatments of same-sex love, historical terms, and contemporary events. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about homosexuality.
