Table Of ContentScreening Queer Memory
Library of Gender and Popular Culture
From Mad Men to gaming culture, performance art to steampunk fashion, the
presentation and representation of gender continues to saturate popular media.
This series seeks to explore the intersection of gender and popular culture,
engaging with a variety of texts - drawn primarily from Art, Fashion, TV, Cinema,
Cultural Studies and Media Studies – as a way of considering various models
for understanding the complementary relationship between 'gender identities'
and ‘popular culture’. By considering race, ethnicity, class, and sexual identities
across a range of cultural forms, each book in the series adopts a critical stance
towards issues surrounding the development of gender identities and popular
and mass cultural ‘products’.
For further information or enquiries,
please contact the library series editors:
Claire Nally: [email protected]
Angela Smith: [email protected]
Advisory Board:
Dr Kate Ames, Central Queensland University, Australia
Prof Leslie Heywood, Binghamton University, USA
Dr Michael Higgins, Strathclyde University, UK
Prof Asa Kroon, Orebro University, Sweden
Dr Niall Richardson, Sussex University, UK
Dr Jacki Willson, Central St Martins, University of Arts London, UK
Published and forthcoming titles:
The Aesthetics of Camp: Post-Queer Film Bodies: Queer Feminist
Gender and Popular Culture Encounters with Gender and Sexuality
By Anna Malinowska in Cinema
By Katharina Lindner
Ageing Femininity on Screen: The
Older Woman in Contemporary Gay Pornography: Representations of
Cinema Sexuality and Masculinity
By Niall Richardson By John Mercer
All-American TV Crime Drama: Gender and Austerity in Popular
Feminism and Identity Politics in Law Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and
and Order: Special Victims Unit Recession in Film and Television
By Sujata Moorti and Lisa Cuklanz By Helen Davies and Claire
O’Callaghan (Eds)
Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies: Sex,
Performance and Safe Femininity The Gendered Motorcycle:
By Gemma Commane Representations in Society, Media and
Popular Culture
Beyond: Celebrity Feminism in the Age
By Esperanza Miyake
of Social Media
By Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs Gendering History on Screen: Women
Filmmakers and Historical Films
Conflicting Masculinities: Men in
By Julia Erhart
Television Period Drama
By Katherine Byrne, Julie Anne Girls Like This, Boys Like That:
Taddeo and James Leggott (Eds) The Reproduction of Gender in
Contemporary Youth Cultures
Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body
By Victoria Cann
Size in Contemporary Hollywood
Cinema The Gypsy Woman: Representations in
By Barbara Plotz Literature and Visual Culture
By Jodie Matthews
Fathers on Film: Paternity and
Masculinity in 1990s Hollywood Love Wars: Television Romantic Comedy
By Katie Barnett By Mary Irwin
Masculinity in Contemporary Science Television Comedy and Feminity:
Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Queering Gender
Other Men of the Future By Rosie White
By Marianne Kac-Vergne
Gender and Early Television: Mapping
Moving to the Mainstream: Women Women’s Role in Emerging US and
On and Off Screen in Television and British Media, 1850–1950
Film By Sarah Arnold
By Marianne Kac-Vergne and Julie
Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity
Assouly (Eds)
in Tween Popular Culture
Paradoxical Pleasures: Female By Melanie Kennedy
Submission in Popular and Erotic
Women Who Kill: Gender and
Fiction
Sexuality in Film and Series of the
By Anna Watz
Post-Feminist Era
Positive Images: Gay Men and By David Roche and Cristdle Maury
HIV/AIDS in the Culture of ‘Post- (Eds)
Crisis’
Wander Woman: Feminism, Culture
By Dion Kagan
and the Body
Queer Horror Film and Television: By Joan Ormrod
Sexuality and Masculinity at the
Young Women, Girls and Postfeminism
Margins
in Contemporary British Film
By Darren Elliott-Smith
By Sarah Hill
Queer Sexualities in Early Film:
Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies: Sex,
Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy
Performance and Safe Femininity
By Shane Brown
By Gemma Commane
Steampunk: Gender and the Neo-
Are You Not Entertained?
Victorian
Mapping the Gladiator across Visual
By Claire Nally
Media
By Lindsay Steenberg
Screening Queer Memory
LGBTQ Pasts in Contemporary
Film and Television
Anamarija Horvat
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2021
Copyright © Anamarija Horvat, 2021
Anamarija Horvat has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. x–xi constitute an
extension of this copyright page.
Cover design by Charlotte Daniels
Cover image: Pride (2014) (© Photofest NYC)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given
in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have
ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-8765-8
ePDF: 978-1-3501-8766-5
eBook: 978-1-3501-8767-2
Series: Library of Gender and Popular Culture
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Contents
List of figures viii
Series editor’s foreword ix
Acknowledgements x
Introduction: Locating queer memory 1
Part One Queer memories of the screen 17
1 The picture of Arthur Stuart: Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine
and queer fan memory 25
2 Going on Faith: Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman
and the invention of Black lesbian memory 41
Part Two Queer memory, intergenerationality and television 61
3 Haunting and queer histories: Representing postmemory
in Joey Soloway’s Transparent 67
4 New spies, old tricks: Intergenerational narratives and memories
of the AIDS crisis in London Spy 82
Part Three Remembering queer activism 103
5 Reimagining LGSM: Gendered activism and neoliberalism in
Matthew Warchus’s Pride 109
Conclusion: The borders of memory: Transnational trends
in LGBTQ representation 136
Notes 140
Bibliography 163
Film and television references 180
Index 183
List of figures
1 Arthur looks furtively at the television 26
2 The fan imagines coming out 26
3 Fan fantasies – Arthur’s drawing of Brian 31
4 Curt as a Ken doll 33
5 Cheryl mimics Fae’s mammy next to a recording of
Plantation Memories 47
6 Diana and Cheryl framed by cinema, in the video store 50
7 Cheryl and Diana watch a film of Fae’s before they first have sex 50
8 Cheryl and Diana positioned directly in front of a poster of Isaac
Julien’s The Attendant 53
9 The season two opening credits and lesbian counter-memory 74
10 National memory – a female couple looks at the Statue of Liberty 75
11 Ali and the young grandma Rose hold hands 79
12 The terrified Gittel looks back through time at her family 79
13 The salacious media treatment of Alex’s death and his relationship
with Danny 85
14 Danny at the warehouse 88
15 Danny during his encounter with the police 89
16 The ‘Blue’ room and Scottie’s partner on the bed 95
17 Scottie recounts his partner’s illness 99
18 Danny swims in blue 100
19 Stella squeezes between ‘Martha’ Scargill and Joe to tell
a displeased Steph about LAPC 116
20 Pride’s closing frame – a banner pointing towards the significance
of solidarity for the world 127
Series editor’s foreword
As with many books in the Bloomsbury Library of Gender in Popular Culture,
Anamarija Horvat’s Screening Queer Memory: LGBTQ Pasts in Contemporary
Film and Television shows how marginalized or occluded narratives can enter
the realm of popular culture. In this book, she offers a robust and theoretically
astute examination of queer cinema, television and LGBTQ history. Horvat’s
research navigates the critical terrain of queer theory and specifically the idea of
LGBTQ memory. In examining material like Amazon’s Transparent (2014–19)
and Pride (2014) and the identification of queer histories, Horvat uncovers
the complexities of intergenerational memory (and its absence) as well as the
tensions involved in such representations. This material is exceptionally timely
and shows a studied attention to developments in critical thinking such as affect
and intersectionality, as well as contextual issues such as the debates surrounding
trans access to women-only spaces. Horvat also draws extensively on archival
material, which in many instances uncovers a new history of queer identities
and debates within the community.
Such an engagement with queer visibility and narrative also situates this
volume alongside several others in the Library of Gender and Popular Culture,
including Darren Elliott-Smith’s Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality
and Masculinity at the Margins (2016), Katherine Lindner’s Film Bodies: Queer
Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema (2017) and Shane
Brown’s Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy
(2016). Horvat’s attention to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, and its subsequent
representation on screen, draws many comparisons with Dion Kagan’s book
Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Culture of ‘Post Crisis’ (2018).
Ultimately, this book testifies to the urgency and sensitivity of these intellectual
debates within and outside of LGBTQ cultures.
