Film audiences have grown used to seeing female characters in "performance roles," singing or dancing on stages in nightclubs, musical arenas, or theaters--performing their "femaleness" for the fictional audience as well as the film viewing audience. But queer women in film perform on yet another level. In addition to performing their gender for the world, they also perform their sexuality for either a general or an "insider" audience, in ways that can be read to establish a queer visibility, to establish a sense of community, or to show romantic lesbian interest. This work examines "performance spaces" for lesbian identities in films, evaluating how queer femaleness is signified in contemporary cinema. It studies five films in particular: When Night Is Falling, Better Than Chocolate, Tipping the Velvet, Slaves to the Underground, and Prey for Rock and Roll. Through close textual analysis, evaluations of the conditions under which each film was produced and received, and dozens of audience surveys, it reveals much about both the story worlds of the films and the ways that queer women react to and feel about them.

With intellectual reference points that include Foucault and Freud, Wittig, Kristeva and Irigaray, this is one of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years and is perhaps the essential work of contemporary feminist thought.

Queerness in Play examines the many ways queerness of all kinds—from queer as ‘LGBT’ to other, less well-covered aspects of the queer spectrum—intersects with games and the social contexts of play. The current unprecedented visibility of queer creators and content comes at a high tide of resistance to the inclusion of those outside a long-imagined cisgender, heterosexual, white male norm. By critically engaging the ways games—as a culture, an industry, and a medium—help reproduce limiting binary formations of gender and sexuality, Queerness in Play contributes to the growing body of scholarship promoting more inclusive understandings of identity, sexuality, and games.

So, the film or television lesbian character dies. It seems to happen frequently. But does it really? If so, is it something new? Surveying the fates of numerous characters over decades, this study shows that killing off the lesbian is not a new trend. It is a form of symbolic annihilation and it has had an impact in real life. When more women are working behind the scenes, what appears on-screen also becomes more diverse--yet unhappily the story lines don't necessarily change. From the Xenaverse to GLAAD to the Lexa Pledge, fans have demanded better. As fan fiction migrates from the computer screen to the printed page, authors reanimate the dead and insist on happy endings.

Contributions exploring the representation and reality of LGBTQ+ individuals and issues in historical and contemporary German-speaking culture. The German-speaking lands have a long history of engagement, ranging from celebratory to horrific, with non-normative genders and sexualities, including through cultural output, language, and politics. Queering German Culture, volume 10 of the Edinburgh German Yearbook, foregrounds this via new analyses of a variety of LGBTQ+ cultural artifacts - archives both physical and digital, literature in the form of novels and periodicals, and film both narrative and documentary - to consider a spectrum of gender and sexual identities. Individual chapters employ a range of lenses, including psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonial and queer theory, to analyze work by ThomasMann, Thomas Brussig, Jenny Erpenbeck, Terézia Mora, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Fatih Akin, among others. Contributors: Nicholas Courtman, Leanne Dawson, Kyle Frackman, Sarra Kassem, Lauren Pilcher, John L. Plews, Gary Schmidt, Cyd Sturgess. Leanne Dawson is Lecturer in German and Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Popular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative capacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make sense of identity and allows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arousing the political imagination. With an activist voice that is impassioned yet adherent to scholarly rigour, Playing it Queer provides an original and compelling ethnographic account of the relationship between popular music, queer self-fashioning and (sub)cultural world-making. This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant literatures on queer identity and political debates as well as popular music, identity and (sub)cultural style. Contextualised within a detailed history of queer sensibilities and creative practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club cultures, the author's rich empirical studies of local performers and translocal scenes intimately capture the meaning and value of popular musics and (sub)cultural style in everyday queer lives.

"Within the realm of U.S. culture and its construction of its citizenry, geography, and ideology, who are Southerners and who are queers, and what is the South and what is queerness? Queering the South on Screen addresses these questions by examining "the intersections of queerness, regionalism, and identity" depicted in film, television, and other visual media about the South during the twentieth century. From portrayals of slavery to gothic horror films, the contributors show that queer southerners have always expressed desires for distinctiveness in the making and consumption of visual media. Read together, the introduction and twelve chapters deconstruct premeditated labels of identity such as queer and southern. In doing so, they expose the reflexive nature of these labels to construct fantasies based on southerner's self-identification based on what they were not"--