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Queer Studies Easter
Symposium
Simposio de Estudios
Queer de la Pascua
Mexico City/Ciudad
de México
Abstracts/Resúmenes
de ponencias 2009
Narcos,
Necros, and Homos: On Queer Geographies and
Phenomenologies in Film
Daniel
Portland
Department
of Art & Public Policy
Tisch School of the Arts
New
York
Two
points in time have been located, the end of the
nineteenth / beginning of the twentieth century and the
end of the twentieth / beginning of the twenty-first
century. Within both points, stories and specific scenes
within those stories have been cited. They have been
scenes in which the same-sex desiring body has suffered
the affliction of a particular somatic sickness, whether
it be vampirism or narcolepsy or zombiefication, and in
which the affliction has had a direct relationship to
the separation or dissolution of a same-sex romantic
coupling. That the contemporary examples have not only
replicated the structure of the earlier example, but
have done so within the context of the filmic medium and
against a backdrop of prostitution have been the
curiosities propelling the present exploration.
An
attempt toward an explanation of, or rather toward an
investigation into, how these curiosities might be
accounted has suggested the following: The emergence of
the homosexual who is recognized as such, i.e.
recognized as something more than a sodomite, has been
contextualized by D’Emilio in terms of the shifting
purposes to which was put the heterosexual nuclear
family conterminously with the rise of industrial
capital in place of agrarianism. In the artistic realm,
witnessed was the advent and increasingly wide
circulation of photography and film, which necessitated
new ways of reading images, namely through captions
arranged sequentially in time.
The
family unit dictates and directs a certain sequence in
time. The homosexual either arranges himself in
accordance with the sequence or produces another
sequence that is not proscribed or results from an
antagonism with proscription. The sequencings of My
Own Private Idaho and Otto;
or, Up with Dead People do the latter and in so
doing mirror the queer trajectories forced upon and
assumed by young gay hustlers.
Where
these trajectories intersect and surpass objects of
desire, however, occasions the morphologies of the
characters of Mike and Otto respectively. Mike’s
narcolepsy is symptomatic of the ephemeral existence of
a life that does not align and therefore does not
register with the normative life (the life of the
beloved, which is temporary in the opposite direction)
and subsequently is a life of tactical retreat.
Simultaneously, narcolepsy, and more generally sleep,
puts Mike in a state in which Scott is able to
administer physical attention. The melancholic zombie
body of Otto exorcises fears of both societal homosexual
contamination and personal loss of love. However, it
also exercises a power in being a body that has
succeeded death itself, in being a body that is
infinitely persistent.
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