Summary: | Historically speaking, the queer film festival is rooted in grassroots politics
and it exists as a counterculture space. Conversely, genre cinema is associated
with classical Hollywood and it is largely associated with mainstream,
heteronormative value systems. The queer romantic comedy represents a major
flashpoint as a crossover phenomenon: in its ability to infiltrate these
diametrically opposed cultural systems, it is viewed as both traitor and arbitrator
simultaneously. The response to this queered genre is directly related to critical
debates surrounding the question of whether the queer film festival space has
become or seeks to become redundant. Ironically, while the question of
redundancy circulates, critical analysis of the queer film festival space has only
recently begun to emerge, while the queer romantic comedy itself is virtually nonexistent
within genre theory. As such, I argue that the queer film festival and the
queer romantic comedy are inextricably linked as sites of transgression, and that,
neither are becoming redundant.
To construct my analysis, I use the Vancouver Queer Film Festival as a
blueprint for the selection of gay and lesbian romantic comedies. I cite a number
of critical thinkers, however, key to my analysis are a series of forums on the
queer film festival published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, as
well as Rick Altman’s genre theory and Bakhtin’s concept of carnival. In chapter
two, I provide an historical overview of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and
outline my primary data for analysis. In chapter three, I draw from the GLQ
forums to contextualize key debates surrounding the changing role of the queer
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film festival. In chapter four, I insert queer romantic comedy into the lexicon of
genre theory to explore the use of self-reflexivity as a political tool. In chapters
five and six, I compare the gay and lesbian romantic comedy collections,
focusing on primary tropes, modes of address and media response to locate
points of disruption within these ‘generic’ texts. In the concluding chapter, I
consider the question of redundancy in relation to actual and authorized
transgression within queer romantic comedy and the queer film festival space.
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