The Routledge Queer Studies Reader
With the publication of 'The Routledge Queer Studies Reader', we pay homage to the publication, nearly twenty years previous, of 'The Routledge Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader'. Consistent with the notion of performativity that was a grounding concept for one influential strand of theorizing in the 1990s, the appearance on bookshelves around the English-speaking world of the 'Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader' confirmed the emergence of a new scholarly field, in so far as its own chunky materiality 'constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express'. It was less its authoritative heft-weighing in at 666 pages, the 'Reader' drew together forty-two essays, dwarfing every other similar title in the field to date-than the fact that, in laying a claim to the genre of the reader, it also laid claim to the broader existence of a capacious and thriving field of work, sufficiently coherent to be understood as lesbian and gay studies.
An Ordinary Person
Taking as its starting point a cluster of killings in Auckland in 2003-4, An Ordinary Person investigates and analyses the so-called 'homosexual advance defence' to murder. Interviews with lawyers in the cases, legal academics and a journalist are inter-cut with a stylized dramatization and deconstruction of the homophobic narrative that props up the use of provocation as defence to murder in criminal proceedings.
Dangerous Spaces: 'Safe'
Released in 1995, 'Safe' (US/UK) seems in many ways radically different from Todd Haynes's earlier work. On one level, the film is a forward-moving story about the increasingly debilitating, unidentified illness of a middle-class, suburban homemaker. Devoid of flashbacks or more avant-garde techniques of narrative disruption or interruption, the film's structure appears deceptively straightforward. Attempting to find a cure for her disease, the central protagonist, Carol White (Julianne Moore), commences a journey that takes her away from her comfortable domestic environs in Los Angeles to a retreat in the desert of New Mexico, where she submits to various New Age-inspired therapies. Despite its apparently conventional content and form, 'Safe' confounded critics with its polysemic openness to multiple interpretations and its refusal to offer audiences any insight into the central protagonist's experience or emotional life.¹ These responses are symptomatic of the film's deployment of seemingly contradictory modes of filmmaking. 'Safe' regularly employs a distanced style of cinematography while constructing sequences that deploy editing techniques ordinarily used to suture viewers into the narrative. The effect of this combination is to withhold the identification with character that such classical techniques conventionally secure, while at the same time foregrounding their usual ideological effects.