Queer Strategies and Tentacles

e-flux is pleased to announce Queer Strategies and Tentacles, a two-part online program curated by Rosa Barotsi and Zairong Xiang. Commencing on November 11, 2024, the series will run in eight chapters over the course of sixteen weeks, until March 2, 2025. Each chapter will be available to stream for two weeks. 

The program features films and videos by Jiang Zhi, Eva Stefani, Xu Tan, Jorge Jácome, Shen Xin, Peng Zuqiang, Fan Popo, Sophia Farantatou, Eunice Gutman, Regina Veiga, Tao Hui, Emanuela Pirelli, Ion de Sosa, Monica Stambrini, Enoch Cheng, Maria Arena, Cui Zien, Deniz Şimşek, and Simone Cangelosi.

What are the strategies queer subjects and communities deploy for survival and resistance against assimilation, identity-ghettoization, disenfranchisement, gentrification, and other forms of repression that may or may not be immediately related to the questions of gender and sexuality? These struggles have been at the forefront of queer liberation, yet they have long been overshadowed by victimization or liberal coming-out narratives, which are not only politically conservative and compromising, but also uninspired in form and imagination.

Queer Strategies and Tentacles dives into the complex tensions and politics expressed in films, videos, and other audiovisual works by and/or about queer subjects that embody campy, grotesque, monstrous, and speculative extravaganzas, as well as humorous, DIY, no-budget, B-movie aesthetics that circumvent the neoliberal, genre-specific, Western-bourgeois, “out and proud” sanitized ethno-class of the contemporary LGBTQ mainstream. Very much eclectic and by no means exhaustive,  it is nonetheless our hope that the program lays out the kaleidoscopic experiences of queer existence across different geographic and historic locations, in an imaginative clash of formal expressions, genres, modes of production, and intended audiences.

Centered on queer-themed works, the program spills over to include films that do not necessarily look at or represent strictly-speaking “queer subjects” (and what is queer, if not a sensibility against the “strictly/straightly” speaking?), to resist the idea that a program about queer film has to be a representation of circumscribed queer desire—but also without reproducing the other-wise colonial and empty claims of queering everything everywhere. It is our hope that the films contaminate, haunt, occupy, flirt with, and extend tentacles to other works that claim some affinity.

Program
I. The Shape of Desire: Sexuality in Urban Transformation
Gender and sexuality have always played a role in shaping urban spatiality, especially during times of rapid transformation, along the waves of economic booms and crashes, or in tandem with new technological developments. Be it in the process of becoming futuristic metropolis or retro-nostalgic ruin, or both, the changing cityscape is symbiotic with cycles of newly-formed or newly-visibilized queer bodies, at the same time as it further marginalizes and polices them. In Part I of the screening series, those inhabiting diverse geographies and histories of urban transformations become our role models, take us on journeys into the nostalgic past-future of the city (ruins), share love stories that interrogate orientalist and romantic classist fantasies (“happy together”); and complicate representations of urban space as a a space of queer liberation (“Set fire to the fascists”).

The Shape of Desire presents four chapters, starting with Role Models, featuring Jiang Zhi, Our Love (2005, 78 minutes); Eva Stefani, Days and Nights of Demetra K. (2021, 72 minutes). Nostalgia (Ruins?) features Xu Tan, Homemade in China II (1997–2011, 24 minutes); Jorge Jácome, Fiesta Forever (2016, 22 minutes); Eva Stefani, Acropolis (2001, 25 minutes). Happy Together features Shen Xin, The Gay Critic (2015, 26 minutes); Peng Zuqiang, Sight Leak (2022, 12 minutes). Fuego στους φασίστες [Set Fire To The Fascists] features Fan Popo, The Drum Tower (2019, 17 minutes); Sophia Farantatou, Bitter September  (2022, 25 minutes).

II. The Poetics of Disguise: Fake it! Not Because I Want to Make It
One of the most prevalent strategies of survival for queers across history, as well as across different cultures, has been to pass as someone else—to be straight-passing, cis-passing, or even gay-passing as a safeguard against the risks of being perceived as transgressing normative expectations of gender and sexuality. An investigation into “the poetics of disguise” might allow us to revisit the technology of the self (Foucault), the epistemology of the closet (Sedgwick), or the political economics of counterfeit, which Cui Zien once called the Communist International of Queer Films. Through the poignant and flamboyant history of queer art, “passing” has at times functioned as an artistic device in itself and a privileged strategy for playing with the ambiguous representational dialectics between “real” and “fake.” Yet “faking it,” in the kind of queer strategies that interests us, might not always have an end goal of “making it.” Success, spelled out as definitive identity or membership in the capitalist class—let’s not forget that class drag also has a history of its own that weaves itself intimately with that of gender and sexuality—is not the ambition here. Our films reach out, like tentacles, to make what seems so straight-wardly and unquestionably authentic, if not fake, at least queerly vague. It’s a survival mode and a poetics in the theater of life (or life as theater), a narrative device that helps animate the exhilaration of transgressive sexuality  (“Veneno pa tu piel” [Poison for your skin]), a compass with which to navigate the spatial poetics of aggressive gentrification as well as the emotional labyrinths of family (Dear Mom, dear Dad…).

The Poetics of Disguise comprises four chapters, starting with Theater of Life, featuring Eunice Gutman and Regina Veiga, Só no Carnaval (1982, 12 minutes); Tao Hui, Similar Disguise, 2020 (8 minutes);  Emanuela Pirelli Le Coccinelle - sceneggiata transessuale (2011, 52 minutes). “Veneno pa tu piel” features  Ion de Sosa, Mamàntula (2023, 48 minutes); Monica Stambrini, Queen Kong (2016, 20 minutes); Enoch Cheng, Just like snakes (2023, 21 minutes). Gentrification features Maria Arena, Gesu è morto per i peccati degli altri (2014, 90 minutes); Cui Zien, We are the …of Communism (2007, 93 minutes). Dear Mom, Dear Dad features Deniz Şimşek, detours while speaking of monsters(2024, 18 minutes); Simone Cangelosi, Dalla testa ai piedi (2007, 28 minutes); Tao Hui, The Night of Peacemaking (2022, 22 minutes). 

The curators would like to thank Dong Bingfeng, Ana David, Giulia Cosentino, Peter Taylor, Geli Mademli, Dou Yueqi,  and Luciano D’Onofrio—Streeen! 

Visit the program here. For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.