CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Baqais, Dávid |
|---|---|
| Title | The Affective Potential of Queer Shame on Screen |
| Summary | This thesis explores the potential of shame as intersubjective affect through three filmic representations of queer shyness in widely divergent cinematic texts: Tom Ford’s high-profile US film adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man (chapter 1); Alain Guiraudie’s French erotic thriller L’Inconnu du lac, an art house exploration of queer desire, sex and death (chapter 2); and a Brazilian short film directed by Daniel Ribeiro, entitled Eu Nau Quero Voltar Sozinho, an coming-of-age narrative of a blind teenage boy (chapter 3). These ideas are rehearsed against the theoretical backdrop of Leo Bersani’s and Lee Edelman’s antirelational queer theory, José Estaban Muñoz’s work on queer potentiality, relationality and hope as articulated in Cruising Utopia in opposition to antiutopian antirelationality, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s affective turn (in particular her theorizing on shame and her concept of paranoid and reparative reading). The analyses in the first two chapters gesture toward a displacement of antirelational queer theory’s overinvestment in the radicality of strategically embracing cultural fantasies of male homosexuality as psychic negativity or erotic self-annihiliation. In contrast to these tropes, a vision of queer relationality grounded in the relational dynamics of shame is forwarded, drawing on Sedgwick’s work on shame inspired by Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory. The shy queer man thus comes to figure as a counterpoint to the death-driven queer subject enraptured by jouissance. The third chapter, in turn, moves from such a contrastive “anti-an tirelational&#x 201d; engagement to a closer exploration of Tomkins’s theory of shame, combining it with phenomenological film theory and Sara Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology, arguing that the short film’s climactic moment allows us to think shame as utopian potentiality as conceived by Muñoz. Finally, the conclusion suggests a conception of shame as reparative affect in contrast to routinized habits of thought in paranoid antirelational queer theory. |
| Supervisor | Timár, Eszter |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/baqais_david.pdf |
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