[Filmfestivalresearch] Book announcement - LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness

[Antoine Damiens]

Dear friends and colleagues,

I'm delighted to announce the publication of my book, LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness (Amsterdam University Press, details below).

Take care and stay safe,

Antoine Damiens
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LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463728409/lgbtq-film-festivals <https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463728409/lgbtq-film-festivals>  current 40% off with coupon "virtualscms"

While scholars have theorized major film festivals, they have ignored smaller, ephemeral, events. In taking seriously minor European and North-American LGBTQ festivals which often only exist as traces within archival collections, this book revisits festival studies' methodological and theoretical apparatuses. As the first 'critique' of festival studies from within, LGBTQ Film Festivals argues that both festivals and queer film cultures are by definition ephemeral. The book is organized around two concepts: First, 'critical festival studies' examines the political project and disciplinary assumptions that structure festival research. Second, 'the festival as a method' pays attention to festivals' role as producers of knowledge: it argues that festivals are not mere objects of research but also actors already shaping academic, industrial, and popular cinematic knowledge. Drawing on the author's experience on the festival circuit, this book pays homage to the labour of queer organizers, critics, and scholars and opens up new avenues for festival research.
 
"An engaging and original history of queer film festivals and an insider critique of festival studies at large. Damiens has excavated our archives and offered a colourful tapestry of LGBTQ+ struggles over half a century, probing both the friendship and the activism at their core."
̶ Thomas Waugh, Concordia University, Canada
 
Antoine Damiens is a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of English and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University (Montreal).

Content:
Introduction. Festivals, Uncut: Queering Film Festival Studies, Curating LGBTQ Film Festivals
1.     Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies
2.     The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals, and Queer Cinema’s Legs
3.     Out of the Celluloid Closet, into the Theatres! Towards a Genealogy of Queer Film Festivals and Gay and Lesbian Film Studies
4.     Festivals as Archives: Collective Memory and LGBTQ Festivals’ Temporality
5.     Images+Translation: Imagining Queerness and its Homoscapes
Conclusion. The Impossibility of Festival Studies? On the Temporalities of Field Intervention and the Queering of Festival Studies 

—
Dr. Antoine Damiens
FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow
McGill University
antoine.damiens at mail.mcgill.ca <mailto:antoine.damiens at mail.mcgill.ca>

NECS - Feminist and Queer Research Workgroup (leader)
NECSUS - festival reviews section editor