Film Studies and Digital Media

Drawing from classic psychoanalytic texts (Freud, Lacan, Pontalis) and recent Queer Theory work (Butler, Love, Halberstam), this essay attempts to recover the queerness inherent to psychoanalytic theory as a way to resolve the fundamentally American resistance to methodologies that place the unconscious at their forefront.

The paper asks how digital technology can work as a perverse interface for managing difference through fantasies of male blackness in newly "effective" ways. How is phallic labor outsourced to black masculinity in the digital age? How does blackness function as a prosthetic guarantor of the (white heterosexual) Symbolic through the pornographic?

The essay stages its argument at a Brazilian parking lot utilized for what Tim Dean calls "aimless" cruising, which we may presume erased by the ubiquitous pragmatism of digital technologies. The site becomes a blueprint for understanding what the digital does to desire, and what desire does to the digital.

"A Doll Has No Holes: On The Queerness of Brazilian Children in Xuxa" looks tthe Brazilian television megastar of Latin America in the 80s and 90s to re-frame the current Brazilian symbolic, socio- political and financial crisis. The little academic work produced around Xuxa has reduced her to the perfect embodiment of the ideals of race, gender, citizenship, class and modernity in post-colonial and post-dictatorship Brazil. Diego Semerene Costa  (re-)takes the point of view of a queer child living in Brazil in the 1980s to put forth the concept of “ludic usurpation” and argue that Xuxa’s world actually made room for queerness by masquerading itself as a celebration of all things normative. Originally published In 'Children, Sexuality and Sexualization,' Edited by Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose, and R. Danielle Egan (London: Palgrave UK, 2015): 259-273.

Abstract: This essay explores digital technology 's enabling so-called "gay men " to make contact (sexual and otherwise) with heterosexually identified males through cross-dressing. This phenomenon, which the digital exacerbates, exposes a loophole in heterosexual logic, where the object is revealed to be a semblance, not a finite and neatly gendered materiality. The essay deploys " trans, " then, not as a bounded identity category one might transition into like a final destination, but as a technology for pleasure to where one can transit back and forth through digital mediation. The rise and ubiquity of cruising digital platforms (Craigslist's Casual Encounters, Plenty of Fish, Fetlife, and OkCupid) has enabled " transgender " to be appropriated as a pleasure-making tool that circumvents social doxa regarding the supposed stability of gender, sexuality, sexual practices and the prescribed objects of desire associated with them. As presumably gay men increasingly dress up as women for sexual purposes, posting hookup ads seeking straight men, and presumably heterosexual men catch themselves seduced by them, the limits of sexual identities and their related practices get tested, expanded, trespassed, and rendered porous. The essay weaves together queer theory, psychoanalysis, and autobiographical accounts to investigate the very porosities between identity categories that the digital makes visible and available for play, and to experiment with the urgent role psychoanalysis may have to play in understanding new sexual/existential practices.

This is the feminist tale of heroic women who manage to simultaneously turn the phallus into a laughing stock and a dildo. This is the feminist tale of those who embrace the contradictions of pleasure over the defense mechanisms of repression or incontestable acquiescence. Wanting it while not wanting it, wanting it despite ourselves.

Un grand nombre d’hommes jusqu’ici nommés « gais » se travestissent dans la sphère privée pour poster des annonces sexuelles sur Internet en cherchant les hommes « hétéros . »  Par cette recherche, les limites des identités sexuelles, ainsi que des objets liées à elles, sont testées, étirées, re-signifiées et même ridiculisées. Grâce au numérique, une rencontre « trans-orientationnelle » se produit, ce qui ouvre la porte à une nouvelle façon de penser et de pratiquer la différence sexuelle. C’est un rapport fondé sur le semblant, sur la multiplicité, sur l’objet de désir comme ses alentours. La matérialité du corps apparaît comme toile, comme voile, comme écran – pas comme substance. Ce phénomène révèle aussi une faille dans la logique hétérosexuelle. Lorsque l'objet se dénonce comme un semblant potentiellement divorcé de son référent matériel, ces deux figures (la travesti bâtie par le numérique et cet homme hétéro éveillé par le numérique qui la désire) se mettent en contact, se touchent, se baisent, se découvrent, s’utilisent, s’aiment. Qu’est-ce que la jouissance de la travesti peut dire d’un système symbolique et social qui dénie son existence et sa valeur?

The directorial debut of acclaimed Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa, based on his own autobiographical novel, refuses the usual attempts at heroic reparation and redemption associated with the genre. It approaches the subject with the strange and unbearable melancholy that queer boyhood actually involves. It's a quiet thud of a film, which embraces, with grace and precision, the nastiness of growing up with desire stuck in one's throat.

It's difficult to recall a film that understands gay desire, or desire tout court, so well and which translates it so strikingly. Its magnificence comes from the way it unfolds like a literary myth, with the visceral simplicity of a tragedy, while demystifying certain truisms about queer sexual practices: that gay men didn't instrumentalize one another as much before Grindr, that digital cruising has replaced face-to-face cruising, that flirting with death is in the libidinal makeup of only a pathological minority.

This paper explores the relationship between the digital desiring subject of our time and his/her digital (sexual) gadgets as a fundamentally infantile and ritualized way of managing the death drive. The paper recognizes the 21st century as a post-cinematic era in which the subject's relationship to media coincides with his/her relationship to desire: perennially excessive, marred by anxiety, and difficult to articulate. It also suggests, through a close reading of the movement of images in online sexual economies that despite the widely available technology of moving images, the digital subject chooses the still image as a mode of representation over the too-revealing movement of the moving image in his/her transactions of desire-which may or may not amount to a physical encounter, though it certainly produces endless, and endlessly deferred, impressions of its possibility. Like a masturbatory prosthesis capable of turning the supposed continuity of time (in which each instant dies to give way to the next) into the circular repetition of the neurotic (in which each time feels like the first time), the digital serves as world-making device for the subject to stage old modes of being that feel very new, and newer at each repetition. The still image traps or seizes that which the moving image lets out or leaks much in the same way the notion of the category contains, or maims, the chaotic/oceanic/excessive queerness of Desire.

The circularity inherent to cruising is derailed when romantic sparks are kindled in the middle of the orgy. Théo (Geoffrey Couët) and Hugo (François Nambot) look at each other in the eye and suddenly all other bodies in the room are demoted to supporting players—or witnesses to their immediate connection. If the banality of hedonism that the sex club represents belongs to a parallel gay cosmopolitan world where carnal needs shall always be copiously gratified, that world also abides by another type of temporality.

The essay culls from classical texts and personal experiences of libertine intimacy with strangers to address age-old academic blind spots regarding group sex as a recurring fantasy and sexual practice. What is brought forth is a Freudian and Lacan-ian analysis of the relationship between contemporary desire and digitality through " the gangbang " as articulated on digital platforms. The focus is on digitally-assisted gang-bangs involving a transvestite and several heterosexually identified males, and what such events reveal about digital media's and heterosexuality's demands. The author argues that this sexual configuration is a re-enactment of " the great misdeed " , which Freud recounts in Totem and Taboo as the mythic primordial killing of the Father by the band of brothers. This symbolic occasion is described as the genesis of social organization and re-emerges as a form of mourning the disappearance of the fleshly body as new media turn it into digital code. Such a codification of the body awakens anxieties around the fictitious conflation between penis and phallus. In the face of the digital, man outsources his phallic power, which is suddenly required to be represented corporally at all times, to a virtually organized multitude that is willing to sacrifice freedom in the name of the group, and the legitimation of hetero-masculinity that it can presumably grant. The gangbang also appears as a digitally mediated opportunity for old fantasies of aggression and expiation to articulate themselves without putting the white male heterosexual body on the line.