“Queering Carrie” at Cine Excess Cult Film Conference

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=67439260&blogID=252407438&MyToken=c0b7c708-76a9-4936-9825-3a6d67f76d90

Incase any of you are interested am v. excited to be giving a paper at the 1st International Cult Film Conference Cine-Excess. It's put on my Brunel University and is part of the upcoming Sci Fi London Film Festival at the Apollo West End in Regents St.

I'm delivering a pared down version of a chapter from my PhD entitled:

Queering the Cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a Feminist/Misogynistic Icon in Charles Lum's Indelible

Here's the abstract for those of you interested it looks like a fun filled couple of days - the webaddress is www.cine-excess.com :

Queering the Cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a Feminist/Misogynist Icon in Charles Lum's INDELIBLE (US, 2004)

Queering Carrie focuses on the adoption of the Carrie cult from Stephen King's original novel, by way of Brian De Palma's iconic film version into queer culture which both embraces and regurgitates the narrative, imagery and themes via: a failed stage musical by the RSC, numerous 'drag' Carrie performances on the US independent art-salon circuit, to various references within queer film.  The queering of Carrie, centres around the queer integration of De Palma's visceral text in an avant-garde experimental short video work entitled Indelible (Charles Lum, US, 2004 DVD, 8 mins). The work is a fusion of the misogynistic, explicit eroticism and femininity of De Palma's horror which is juxtaposed in a frenzy of jump cut, split screen and super and sub-impositions with the masochistic, gay hypermasculinity of LA Tool and Die (Joe Gage, US, 1979), a hardcore gay pornographic film.

Indelible is a post-structuralist exercise in suture, of narrative, of genre, of gender and of abject bodily fluids all of which reveal the fictional nature and fragility of sexual subjectivities. HIV and AIDS infuse the work so that is becomes a nihilistic, gross-out and comic contemplation of queer sexual identity and it's struggle with heteronormative assumptions of gay male passivity.

The paper will involve significant psychoanalytical study of Indelible as a visual example of the gay male subject's oscillation between the jouissance of nostalgic sexual practices, the pleasures of voyeurism experienced in memory and negative contemporary social moralities on sexual practices in light of sexually transmitted disease and the shame and guilt experienced in re-visiting, re-playing and re-viewing indelible imagery.

The paper will demonstrate via close textual analysis how filmic narrative and iconic imagery determine how (queer) subjectivities are formed. The study of Queer Carrie will show that, despite his intentions to identify with femininity, the gay male subject's culturally imposed guilt and shame is revealed in a desire for dis-identification with the feminine. This is rendered both explicit and implicit in displays of gynephobia in Carrie's various queer incarnations. Queer appropriations of Carrie reveal the identification practices undertaken by the gay male spectator of the horror genre, and in particular, spectators of an emerging sub-genre New Queer Horror.