“ Queerize the machine”, this is the avowed objective of Joëlle Rouleau, professor in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Montreal. “It’s about doing research outside of normative frameworks,” she explains. I consider it necessary be otherwise, think outside the box, renew methods and approaches. It concerns the gaze that we pose, the way of perceiving, reading, smelling and experiencing the works. »
Queer TVthe collective work directed by Joëlle Rouleau which has just been published by Éditions du remue-ménage, brings together the essays of 10 specialists: Stéfany Boisvert, Tara Chanady, Florian Grandena, Charlotte Kaiser, Antonio Lérida Muñoz, Alexis Poirier-Saumure, Julie Ravary -Pilon, Olivier Tremblay, Christoph Vatter and Arnaud Widendaële.
The book demonstrates the limits of the medium, certainly, but even more its possibilities when it comes to staging radically subversive queer representations. “While there are a host of examples and we discuss them a lot verbally, there is very little written in French about queer television, recalls Joëlle Rouleau. With this book, I wanted to help remedy this situation. »
In her preface, the director explains that the notion of “queer sensibilities” allows her to “consider the multiple dimensions of identity that inevitably accompany the way we position ourselves when we reflect on representations of ourselves and our communities”. Queer sensibilities, she adds, “describe a state of anger and hope, love and rage. They contain all these complex and overwhelming feelings. Simultaneously. All the time. »
Shake up discussions
The book brings together contributions about the aesthetic and narrative forms of several television series, but also variety shows and films produced in the United States, Spain, Canada, Quebec and Germany.
As Joëlle Rouleau writes, it is a question of “shaking up the discussions around queer television” and “underlining that before being a fashionable current, even a criterion for the renewal of a series, the queer is a political and subversive “doing” that reminds us of the reality of ostracization based on sexual practices”.
According to the researcher, we are going through a period of hypervisibility where LGBTQ+ representations abound, from Netflix to Amazon, via Crave: “There are a lot of them, and that in itself is gratifying, especially when you think about the importance that it may have for many teenagers, but it must be recognized that these series are rarely entirely adequate. Often, they perpetuate the stereotypes associated with sexual and gender diversity, which could have the effect of limiting the ways of being queer, that is to say of expressing this identity. In short, there are many works, but not yet a great deal of diversity in the models presented there. »
To tell the truth, Joëlle Rouleau is more or less interested in the quality of television series or the media representation of queer culture: “What deserves much more to be explored, in my opinion, are the standards of production and reception of objects televisions. This is what I proposed to the contributors to the book to question in their analyses. »
The academic is aware that the work she has edited is sharp, not to say cerebral, but she persists in believing that certain chapters are more accessible than others and that the works observed, the vast majority of which belong to what is known as popular culture, will attract a diversified readership.
“We can navigate as we please in this book,” explains the researcher. We’re talking about very popular shows, like American Horror StoryWhere 13 Reason Whybut also lesser known ones, such as the Spanish series The other mirada or the Latin American web series Brujos. Stéfany Boisvert and Tara Chanady are specifically interested in what is happening on Quebec and Canadian channels. There is even question of the role of television in Gregg Araki’s psychotronic cinema. I have no doubt that very different people will find their front door. »