Screening Queer Memory: Lgbtq Pasts in Contemporary Film and Television

In Screening Queer Memory, Anamarija Horvat examines how LGBTQ history has been represented on-screen, and interrogates the specificity of queer memory. She poses several questions: How are the pasts of LGBTQ people and communities visualised and commemorated on screen? How do these representations comment on the influence of film and television on the construction of queer memory? How do they present the passage of memory from one generation of LGBTQ people to another? Finally, which narratives of the queer past, particularly of the activist past, are being commemorated, and which obscured?

Horvat exemplifies how contemporary British and American cinema and television have commented on the specificity of queer memory - how they have reflected aspects of its construction, as well as participated in its creation. In doing so, she adds to an under-examined area of queer film and television research which has privileged concepts of nostalgia, history, temporality and the archive over memory. Films and television shows explored include Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996), Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine (1998), Jill Soloway’s Transparent (2014-2019), Matthew Warchus’ Pride(2014) and Tom Rob Smith’s London Spy (2015).

Anamarija Horvat is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK. Her work examines contemporary film and television, with a particular focus on LGBTQ representation and queer memory. Her research has been published in Feminist Media Studies and Critical Studies in Television, and in the Encyclopaedia of Gender, Media and Communication and the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Queer Studies and Communication. She is co-founder of the Queer Screens Network and co-chair of the NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) Queer and Feminist Workgroup.