As queer as it is black, Barry Jenkins’ film now finds itself teetering on the edge of becoming the first queer film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. THE STORY: In the Louisiana bayou, big brother Ogun Size is hardworking and steady. A landmark biography explores the crucial resonances among the life, work, and times of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events ... In Blaktino Queer Performance: An Anthology. E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon Rivera-Servera. Moonlight. As the camera lingers over a young Chiron in the bath, queer viewers will recognise how he accepts the sadness of isolation in exchange for a moment’s peace from the hyper-vigilance he’s developed to survive. But that doesn’t make it a film of compromises. McCune, J. While she is not the main focus of the narrative, she does nevertheless show her own development as a character, moving from an absent-minded if loving mother to a gradually more abusive and manipulative drug addict. Borrowing the subtle language of queer yearning, these personifications of self-acceptance spark some of the most moving moments in modern cinema. Found inside – Page 14123 Moonlight makes its story one that concerns an individual and at the same time ... as the godmother of queer theory, Sedgwick, has asserted: To be gay, ... We believe in Truth & Movies. Throughout the film, Nicholas Britell’s musical arrangement and composition undergirds the complex narrative, adding another layer to its rich landscape. Inspired by Todd Haynes’ Carol, explore our potted history of great films that depict gay lives on screen. Editors (view affiliations) Pamela Demory; Book. We are only as real as the masks we wear. "This book helps readers understand Moonlight's profound political and social importance, the innovative technical choices adopted by director Barry Jenkins, and the film's adoption and disruption of traditional coming-of-age themes through ... Each segment of the film opens with a simple word:  Little, Chiron, Black, each representing a stage in the main character’s evolution. Black boys have an affinity for masks and scheduling their removal and adherence. For the privileged among us, it’s an exaggerated reflection our own experiences. Beneath the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia US Supreme Court case is a very simple story: two people, Richard Loving and It is a poignant reminder of how queerness–tender, beautiful, sensuous–can provide meaningful connection and intimacy in even the bleakest and most unfriendly of worlds. It writhes beneath the surface of the narrative, a key component of Chiron’s identity, yet one which he rarely explicitly expresses. Eds. Moonlight brings into the public frame everything from the “war on drugs,” living under “Reaganomics,” the perils of public education, and urban poverty and decay. That’s a far more urgent conversation than sexual expression. A broad spectrum of lesbian life, past and present. Moonlight remains a haunting film precisely because it is so piercing in its glimpse into Chiron’s psyche. Moonlight works a study of how masculine heteronormativity can break us down and rebuild us in its own repressed, damaging image. As quickly as we are drawn into this caretaking between drug dealers, we witness the main protagonist, Chiron, who is called “Little” in this chapter of the film, being chased through the neighborhood by younger black kids calling him “faggot.” James Laxton’s cinematography paints this scene as epic but also emphasizes the size of the little children as the catalyst for the necessity to belittle others with a gendered sexual epithet. As quickly as we are drawn into this caretaking between drug dealers, we witness the main protagonist, Chiron, who is called “Little” in this chapter of the film, being chased through the neighborhood by younger black kids calling him “faggot.” James Laxton’s cinematography paints this scene as epic but also emphasizes the size of the little children as the catalyst for the necessity to belittle others with a gendered sexual epithet. Damon Young. More timely than ever, the Protector of the Small series is Anti-Bullying 101 while also touching on issues of bravery, friendship, and dealing humanely with refugees against a backdrop of an action-packed fantasy adventure. Acknowledging that representations of men confronting violence and pain can reinforce ideas of manly tenacity, Kent L. Brintnall also argues that they reveal the vulnerability of men’s bodies and open them up to eroticization. At home, in school, and on the streets, a homosexual teenager moves through comic sexual experiments, isolation, fear, and exciting expectations toward an escape from childhood and a firm sense of self. Moonlight makes clear, if anything, that in a world always in flux and unstable due to sociocultural and economic conditions, nothing and nobody “just is.” In fact, McCraney and Jenkins make every character more than their cultural scripts allow them to be. The film’s approximation of the past as much as the present allows the viewer to feel as if they have entered a world where all black is beautiful, a world where “black lives truly matter.” This film, and the world within it, starts with a simple refrain drawn from Boris Gardiner’s 1970s classic Jamaican hit, “Every Nigger Is a Star!” This opening song illuminates the true queerness of blackness within this film: unashamedly beautiful, unapologetically complex. It emerges in some of the most unlikely moments, as when he has his erotic encounter with Kevin, and when he later dreams about him before their fateful reunion that concludes the film. E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon Rivera-Servera. Gay or homosexuality is a variation of developed sexual orientation in society. When he reunites with Kevin and that shell cracks, we recognise the relief he feels in the knowledge that he is safe to be his true self. Tags: Change ). Found inside – Page iThis book offers a critical survey of film and media representations of black masculinity in the early twenty-first-century United States, between President George W. Bush’s 2001 announcement of the War on Terror and President Barack ... Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Its depiction of issues regarding societal pressures and familial relations is so immensely intricate and moving that it would be more accurate to describe this … I especially appreciate what you’ve said about fluidity and intimacy, and the sense that queerness “writhes beneath the surface of the narrative”. But we’ll soon see that a general comparison between real lives and fictional representations can only take us so far. Found insideDrawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, ... McCraney’s use of “Chiron,” coupled with the repeated sonic winds and waves, reminds us of the island on which all characters remain, individual and collective. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. interviews This collection of essays illuminates the intersection of queer and adaptation. It fights against ideas of what it means to be “authentic” and allows for a larger acceptance of participants. Moonlight operates in queer terms by specifically skewing sound-image relations as well as incorporating the chopped and screwed style of hiphop to stretch and distort all kinds of music including classical scores with We don’t just want it to win. In Moonlight, Jenkins and McCraney offer deep black intimacy as that which heals, saves and keeps Chiron. That’s not to say closeted black men don’t have sex. Campis an aesthetic that privileges “poor taste,” shock value, and irony, intentionally challe… Yet and still, the film uniquely juxtaposes this dark American chapter with a scene of a diverse black community — laden with black joy, black creativity and black radiance that has historically been relegated to epochs of despair. Queer theory and politics were emerging topics in academic circles, with proponents arguing that gender and sexual categories, such as homosexual and heterosexual, were historical social constructs, subject to change with cultural attitudes. Found inside – Page 238At the same time, the power of this new Swan Lake can be expressed only by a more complex relationship of theoretical accounts, one which conventional ... Follow Queerly Different on WordPress.com. Some queer people want, value, and pursue lifelong romantic relationships and love. 240-002 | CCN: 25473. Moonlight’s Best Picture triumph at the Academy Awards that night was the crest of a cultural wave, ushering in a new era of queer film that is … This joining together — to navigate the waves, so to speak — is a symbolic moment where closeness undoes all that the narratives of their bodies are supposed to bring forth. All of Chiron’s past traumas seem to roil beneath the surface of clenched exterior. ( Log Out / Throughout, he has to contend with the broken relationships that characterize his life, from his drug-addled mother Paula to his love interest and childhood companion Kevin. Indeed, the screenwriter, Tarell Alvin McCraney has spoken eloquently on those burdens, and his acute sensibilities for the particular struggles faced by black men have found their way into the script and the characters that inhabit this world. Even Chiron, who seemingly throughout the film is adverse to touch and intimacy, finds himself able to be “touched” by his longtime friend, Kevin, beachfront and buzzed by marijuana and masturbatory mannishness. This is, in many ways, the most inscrutable and mysterious of the character’s iterations and for that reason it is the most compelling. Alex Hibbert, who plays Little, is that oh-so-rare gem, a child actor who has genuine depth and complexity. But describing it as an exercise in coyness sells the film short. There’s a logic to why Moonlight is sexless – and it’s all to do with the big picture. Queer Cinema Posts about Queer Film Theory written by tjwest3. This San Fransisco-set drama from 2008 is the perfect primer for Barry Jenkins’ critically-acclaimed latest. This signature moment crafts a closeness — ironically charged by Juan’s distinct masculinity (as painted by his chiseled body and hard aesthetic) — juxtaposed with the remarkable silence and fear of Chiron, as queerly sized and queerly placed in the world that seemingly rewards only Juan’s comportment. In these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. makes clear, if anything, that in a world always in flux and unstable due to sociocultural and economic conditions, nothing and nobody “just is.” In fact, McCraney and Jenkins make every character more than their cultural scripts allow them to be. This collection ranges widely to analyse how forests figure in contemporary culture, as well as the wider contexts in which such representations are inserted. Tormented by those around him for his perceived queerness, he has turned to using his body as a shield against a world that seems determined to crush and beat the “softness” out of him. Black is a man who has struggled, and never quite succeeded, in finding a place in an unfeeling world. The title Moonlight sounds romantic and, … 20 queer movie classics you need to see – part 1, Barry Jenkins: ‘Where I come from, people just don’t have the means to make a film’, Before you see Moonlight, seek out Medicine for Melancholy. articles As far as pop culture is concerned, 2016 was really dang queer. Throughout this film we see intimate encounters between black people, uniquely absent of white presence — tilting the world into the unseen and the unknown. It’s not so much that the spectator necessarily feels that they are necessarily there; instead, it’s a feeling of being physically connected to the characters. The Desiring-Image redefines queer cinema as a kind of filmmaking that conveys sexuality and desire as fundamentally fluid for all people, exceeding familiar stories and themes in many LGBT movies. ’s music recalls McCraney’s adoration for Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, a signature and consistent return in his repertoire of plays. ( Log Out / Found insideYet, despite these endless transformations, he remains one of our most revered cultural icons. [In this book, Weldon provides a] look at the cultural history of Batman and his fandom"--Amazon.com. Set in Miami in a time “not distant from the present,” Moonlight distills the reality of black life in a time akin to the 1980s and 1990s Reagan-Bush era. Found insideHolmes, Jeremy (1993), John Bowlby and Attachment Theory, London and New York: ... rated-ranked-call-me-by-your-name-get-out-moonlight-good- a8118726.html> ... Eds. Before coming to Stanford, Míša earned a BA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from Emory University. The film’s approximation of the past as much as the present allows the viewer to feel as if they have entered a world where. It is Trevante Rhodes, however, who really steals the show as Black, Chiron’s final iteration. The Handmaiden (2016) Moonlight (2016) COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this course, we’ll use queer theory to analyze films. As Black, he appears muscle-bound and gruff, and the film makes it clear that this emphasis on increasing his bodily mass and strength are his responses to his troubling youth and to the impotence he felt throughout those formative years. Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies looks to cinematic history to reveal the dynamic ways Asian American men, from Bruce Lee to Long Duk Dong, create and claim a variety of masculinities. The movie tells the story of Chiron, a young, Black, queer man, on a quest for self-acceptance amidst the homophobia of his peers and socioeconomic circumstances of his Atlanta neighborhood. Jenkins and McCraney offer deep black intimacy as that which heals, saves and keeps Chiron. However, the personal cannot be detached from the political, especially not in contemporary times where racism and hypermasculinity are traits that are not only favored, but won the highest office in this nation. There are two relationships through which Chiron experiences intimacy that … It’s a movie of haunting specificity that also speaks to anyone who’s clung to shards of hope despite dejection. (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2017). Found insideTraveling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this book presents a portrait of twentieth-century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history. Our basic premise for the course is that human sexuality and gender are socially constructed and regulated. It’s a vibrant meditation on injustice. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Yet and still, the film uniquely juxtaposes this dark American chapter with a scene of a diverse black community — laden with black joy, black creativity and black radiance that has historically been relegated to epochs of despair. Throughout, he seems to struggle with a profound sense of alienation and isolation from the world around him, though he does experience brief moments of genuine human warmth, particularly when he meets Teresa and Juan (Janelle Monáe and the inimitable Mahershala Ali, respectively), who provide him some measure of stability and genuine human caring. More that the events which shape Chiron’s life – and the world he exists in – are complicated enough to build a character for whom sex is plausibly a risk worth avoiding, no matter how keen the urges. Queerness may not be articulated in obvious ways in Moonlight, but much of queerness isn’t really articulated at all in real life. At its core, Moonlight cannot be simply described as a movie about drugs or violence. This year, the LGBTQ+ community flourished and fought back, was torn down and built itself back up again. “What makes Moonlight such a transcendent work is that it illuminates these invisible lives, beyond the categories that have blinded so many to their humanity and their beauty,” wrote Adam Shatz for The Paris Review. And not forbidden, shadowy sex as seen in films like Brokeback Mountain. In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world ... She is at times monstrous and unrelenting; other times she is childlike or maternal or tender. Found insideProposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Moonlight shows us that you can be a drug dealer and a father figure. A meditative and aesthetically sophisticated film such as this one is notoriously difficult to summarize in terms of plot, but in broad strokes it is a coming-of-age story told in three parts. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. richly captures many of the shared and individual truths about black life, mapping an island where all have the potential to reach their fullest selves — protected by the divine, ancient presence of those deities that protect and guide. Juan the drug dealer saves Chiron from the “faggot”-taunting kids, partnering with his girlfriend (played by Janelle Monáe) to adopt Chiron as their child and turn their house into his “home away from (crack)home.” His crack-addicted mother, who neglects Chiron daily, is attentive to his attendance in school and later professes a love in his adulthood that he (we) had not known previously. Moonlight is a study of aspects of queerness we sometimes find too painful to talk about, because they demand that we accept that many of us were forced to swap the naiveté of “normal” childhood for constant awareness of our surroundings and any potential threats. The Moonlight director discusses the value of film school and finding a personal voice. In Conversation. ( Log Out / Found insideAs Julio Capo Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami's transnational connections reveal that the city has been a queer borderland for over a century. Though, it is important to note: This is no coming-out story; it is a tale of intimacy, presence and absence. In Moonlight, Naomie Harris plays a composite of both Jenkins’s and McCraney’s mothers. Moonlight is a film about masculinity, the wounds and crises of which are the same for all sexualities, but conditioned by the background weather of … Throughout this film we see intimate encounters between black people, uniquely absent of white presence — tilting the world into the unseen and the unknown. It’s a tale of breathtaking simplicity and heartrending intricacy. If You Like... Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. With the sexual content of Moonlight amounting to a few awkward seconds of adolescent hand-jobbing, it’s easy to feel as though the film has exercised “cautiousness”, as the Guardian’s Guy Lodge put it in his recent analysis of the film, when it comes to portraying physical sex. In this course we will investigate queer theory and its intersections with studies of class, race, nation and genre. “ Moonlight ” is a lyric poem in three stanzas. By not showing physical intimacy, Barry Jenkins allows sexuality to surface in his film in other ways. Though it was not what I expected, that does not mean that I didn’t enjoy it. Played by Naomie Harris across all three sections, Paula is ravaged by a … Top Ranking. Intimacy, Loss, Anonymity Toward a Theory of Queer Neutrality 22 June 2017 For the past 20 years, after having curated the Chicago exhibition ‘Disappeared’ on AIDS and an aesthetics of disappearance, John Paul Ricco has theorized erotic and aesthetic relations to loss and withdrawal tied to specific junctures of late-20th-century gay male culture and … The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Black gay lives are fetishized and pitied in the new politically correct movie. With his circular map, McCraney explored unconventional ways of healing, wrought from his childhood experiences — he estimates about two thirds of Moonlight, the finished film, is autobiographical, containing characters based on real people in his life. As we learn during his reunion and rapprochement with Kevin (played as an adult by André Holland, who brings a certain frantic, almost desperate, energy to the character), no man (nor anyone else) has touched him since their erotic encounter on the beach. At its heart, Moonlight is an intensely personal movie that documents the struggle of a person to come to terms with their identity. Visit the main Washington University in St. Louis website. This course explores the encounter between queer theory and aesthetics. An ethnographic exploration of gay and lesbian lives in contemporary Russia. ldquo;An entirely original investigation of the gay and lesbian scene in Russia and a book of enormous value,Queer in Russiawill serve as a beachhead in the field ... Indeed, it’s probably the best film that I’ve seen this year (as cliché as that sounds). 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Affiliations ) Pamela Demory ; book be as dangerous as it is to... Into Chiron ’ s musical arrangement and composition undergirds the complex narrative, adding another layer to rich. Continental Philosophy throughout the film, Nicholas Britell ’ s a far more urgent conversation than sexual.... Despite dejection of contemporary art and architecture, queer theory and aesthetics in... In films like Brokeback Mountain of hope despite dejection, who really steals the show as,. How the very capitalization of queer and adaptation in other ways rebuild in! Bill, especially in the new politically correct movie of hope despite dejection represent ( or misrepresent queer! Sexuality to surface in other ways and sexuality studies and African & African-American studies reunites with Kevin as exercise... A much-needed alternative and complementary critical history of great films that depict gay lives fetishized... To why Moonlight is an intensely personal movie that documents the struggle of a person to come to with! Make it a film can be as dangerous as it is this idea of difference — and even “ ”! Shmoop Editorial Team, “ queer theory taking sex Out of the equation, Jenkins McCraney! Movie about drugs or violence film short come together to tell a beautiful story both.