This thematic section for issue 4 of Whatever – A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies aims to collect contributions investigating and reflecting the ways cinema and other audiovisual texts can be configured through/by a queer perspective.

The term “queer cinema” refers to a heterogeneous series of film texts addressing the deconstruction of the paths of sexuality structured by a dense and lasting cultural rhetoric focused on patriarchal and heteronormative logics. Cinema and audiovisual media seen in their “queerness” offer opportunities of self-representation and cultural self-determination for sexual orientations and non-normative bodies. Tracing a queer perspective means opening the meshes of languages and cinematographic images to bodies conceived in a plurality of genders (transgender, intersex, etc.), and to the transversal routes of fluid sexual orientations (e.g. bisexuality and pansexuality), through an irreverent and unpredictable aesthetics. This suggests that queer cinema cannot be solely reduced to homosexual and lesbian issues (not all gay and lesbian narratives respond to queer aesthetics and logics) but to broaden the field of investigation by including those desire pathways and bodily practices (e.g. transvestism, virtual gendershift, role-playing games, videogame avatars, etc.) which historically and culturally escape reductive gender taxonomies, and which find in the filmic text a cultural space of opposition.

This section aims to seize the overwhelming complexity and expressive richness of queer cinema. For this reason, alongside the attention on the bodies framed in their performative dimension, we want to extend the discursive field to further and converging perspectives. To this end, we would appreciate papers trying to widen the concept of queerness in the cinema and in the media, for example taking into account the following topics:

• Aesthetics, Historical Paths, Styles, Rhetorics;
• Queer World Cinema;
• Interrelations between Queer and Mainstream Cinema;
• Queering the Languages and Genres: Appropriations, Experimentantions and Parodies;
• Queering Digital Media: Videogame, Webseries, Digital Storytelling;
• Queer and Media Art;
• Queer and Tv Series;
• Visions, Representations and Politics

Deadlines and relevant dates

• The deadline for all submissions for issue 4 (general and themed sections alike) is October, 31, 2020.
• Revised versions of accepted papers will be due on February, 28, 2021.
• Last proofs will be sent on May, 21, 2021 and corrections are due on May 25, 2021.
• The issue will be published on June, 20, 2021.

Whatever is double-blind peer-reviewed, online, open-access.

Call for Essays