Director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: a headlong dive into a dazzling, unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art and black mascara. An unknown club dancer at the time, transgender actor […]
– An overview of historical and contemporary Native American concepts of gender, sexuality and sexual orientation. This documentary explores the history of Native American culture in which individuals who embody feminine and masculine qualities act as a conduit between the physical and spiritual world, and because of this are placed in positions of power within […]
Experimental-documentary video film: 90min Authors: Marina Gržinić and Tjaša Kancler Editing: Marina Gržinic, Jovita Pristovšek, Tjaša Kancler Drawing performance: Siniša Ilic, filmed by Luka Papic Music by EsRap Year: 2023 Insurgent Flows includes concepts that are highlighted as they cut through the space of the colonial capitalist interlocking matrix of domination when we analyze these […]
Editors: Sandeep Bakshi (University of Le Havre), Suhraiya Jivraj (University of Kent) and
Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck, University of London)
Counterpress, Oxford, 2016
Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions contributes to the critical field of queer decolonial studies by demonstrating how sexuality, race, gender and religion intersect transnationally. The volume maps some of the specifically local issues as well as the common ones affecting queer/trans people of colour (qtpoc). The contributions are not delimited by traditional academic style but rather draw on creative inspiration to produce knowledge and insight through various styles and formats, including poetry, essays, statements, manifestos, as well as academic mash-ups. Queering coloniality and the epistemic categories that classify people means to disobey and delink from the coloniality of knowledge and of being. At this intersection, decolonial queerness is necessary not only to resist coloniality but, above all, to re-exist and re-emerge decolonially.
A multi-layered work featuring animation, archival footage and interviews with the likes of William Burroughs, Carolee Schneemann and Richard Hell, Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker by Austrian artist Barbara Caspar and co-produced by Annette Pisacane (Nico Icon) and Markus Fischer, is a thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late outlaw writer and punk icon, whose formally inventive novels, published from the ’70s through the mid-’90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon.
GENDER TALENTS is a web-based project by artist Carlos Motta that engages movements and discourses for gender self-determination within trans and intersex communities internationally. It features an online archive of video portraits of trans and intersex activists who thoughtfully perform gender as a personal, social, and political opportunity rather than as a social condemnation. Based on in-depth interviews conducted in Colombia, Guatemala, India and the United States the portraits expose the ways that activists challenge the bio-cultural “foundations” of society and question gender norms from the perspective of sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and disability.
Screenings, film discussions, workshop organized by Black_Women*_Space
Wienwoche, 2015
The Black Her*Stories Project presents the first queer Black feminist film festival in Vienna. The selected films depict stories by and about Black LGBTIQ people (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer), bringing them to the cinema screen and thus creating decolonial and feminist resistance.
The Black Her*Stories Project utilises the medium of film to highlight and pass on queer Black feminist stories. For three nights the cinema Top Kino stands in the light of Black revolutionary resistance. From feature films to documentaries and experimental movie formats, what connects these powerful, artistic and humoristic narratives is their political relevance. Not only do queer Black feminist positions claim space, but social struggles and movements are made visible.
The plot revolves around sexual fantasies aroused in a middle-aged black male museum guard — or attendant — by a young white male visitor. Much of the action takes place after closing time. As the guard paces the galleries, a huge 19th-century painting titled “Slaves on the West Coast of Africa”, by the French artist François-Auguste Biard, comes to life, its melodramatic scene of a white master bending over a dying black slave transformed into an up-to-date, leather clad sadomasochistic grouping.
Edited by Howard Chiang Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 In the vibrant field of queer Asian studies, scholars to date have paid scant attention to transgender topics. Meanwhile, despite its already sophisticated focus on gender non-conformity, Western queer studies exhibits an equally pressing problem: the conspicuous absence of empirical and theoretical investigations of transgenderism in Northeast Asian […]
The documentary “Brothers” takes us to the female-to-male transgender community in China, a community which endures hardships that are unfathomable to the majority of Chinese society. It documents the life of Tony, who forms part of a group of female-to-male transgendered people who call each other brothers. The film shows Tony’s road to self-acknowledgement, his troubles at work, his decision to undergo sex reassignment surgery and all the difficulties he encounters on his path.
Every night, the “Only Love” bar in Nanning puts on a glamorous transvestite show. This documentary follows the four drag queens over a span of three years to depict a touching and realistic perspective beyond flashy costumes, glamorous accessories, dazzling stage sets, and sensual dancing.
Curated by Fernanda Nogueira
March 7, 2015, 4-9pm, VBKÖ, Vienna
This screening program stems from the urgencies of a collective body, a body formed by fragments, a mutant, which resists any classification, provocative, unsatisfied, which creates new ways of living by acting in the territory of transgression. Tropical Video Activism presents video productions – either registers of actions or more experimental poetics – as signs to make visible, read and spread social transformations, which are in furious excitement in the public sphere in many Southern geographies.
These processes are not happening just in a single territory. We can map the social effervescence, the networks arising and intensifying the emergence and encounter of new transborder communities capable of sharing activist tools and circulating critical information which in the past could only be found in independent, underground and thought marginal networks. Facing the urgency of action and its various potentialities in these different territories, the modern categories such as “originality” or “authenticity” are turned obsolete. In contrast, a broader notion of “network” is strengthen daily in the configuration of a collective battlefield […]
