Lauri Mullens: Lauri Mullens is a doctoral student in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California.
The 1991 publication of How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video One of the first (if not the first) publication by an academic press of a book featuring the word “queer” in its title, the volume was initially rejected by numerous publishers before finding one willing to take on the project. In light of the flood of queer studies books in the years since one wonders “why all the fuss?” However, such an explosion of publication would not have been possible without groundbreaking efforts such as this.
The 1989 conference from which the volume takes its title brought together a variety of theorists, film-/video-makers, and activists all grappling with the questions raised in and by the ever increasing body of work known as queer film and video. The sense of this as a conference/dialogue is preserved quite effectively through the inclusion of the valuable discussions which followed each of the presentations. In many instances it is these discussions which vividly demonstrate the complicated interconnectedness of the multitude of issues involved in articulating a queer approach to media.
The various essays which comprise this volume cover a wide range of topics from feminism and race and representation to the reappropriation of historical images and figures, and examine a wide range of queer texts.
Videomaker Stuart Marshall's contribution questions why these symbols (the pink and triangles), in their historical context symbols of “the inconceivable and unspeakable possibility of annihilation” would have become such prevalent and potent images of affirmation and empowerment within the gay and lesbian community. In raising this question he traces the political meanings of such appropriations as well as those rhetorical ones as genocide and Holocaust analogies to the situation of homosexuals today.
In another historically based essay “Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship” Judith Mayne takes up the issue Dorothy Arzner's ambivalent position within the canon of lesbian imagery, both as a closeted (and recently outed) lesbian director and as a the creator of unmistakeably dykey imagery in her films.
Several of the contributions such as Cindy Patton's “Safe Sex and the Pornographic Vernacular,” take up the subject of pornography. Patton explores the possibilities of constructing a distinctly queer visual language for (gay male) safe-sex videos. She asks such questions as “how do you signify safe sex? Was is that magic edge of the condom, the line between shiny and not shiny?...Mus the condom always be visible, along with technically proper application and removal? What about nonpenetrative (condomless) forms of safe sex? Could already-safe activities (licking, jerking off) be signified as safe? Should porn simply show (and therefore eroticize) safe sex? Must safe sex be constituted as a change in practice, requiring some signifier of sexual risk?” Using concrete examples from produced videos, she analyzes the relative merits of many strategies for attempting to signify safety in sexual practice.
In what appears to be a corrective to earlier queer studies discussions, How Do I Look? includes several essays dealing specifically with the place of racial difference in desire.
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