This article looks at cosmopolitanism in the American film musical through the lens of the genre’s self-reflexivity. By incorporating musical numbers into its narrative, the musical mirrors the entertainment industry mise en abyme, and establishes an intrinsic link to America through the act of (cultural) performance. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and its recent application to the genre of the musical, I read the implicitly spatial backstage/stage duality overlaying narrative and number—the musical’s dual registers—as a means of challenging representations of Americanness, nationhood, and belonging. The incongruities arising from the segmentation into dual registers, realms complying with their own rules, destabilize the narrative structure of the musical and, as such, put the semantic differences between narrative and number into critical focus. A close reading of the 1972 film Cabaret, whose narrative is set in 1931 Berlin, shows that the cosmopolitanism of the American film musical lies in this juxtaposition of non-American and American (at least connotatively) spaces and the self-reflexive interweaving of their associated registers and narrative levels. If metalepsis designates the transgression of (onto)logically separate syntactic units of film, then it also symbolically constitutes a transgression and rejection of national boundaries. In the case of Cabaret, such incongruities and transgressions eventually undermine the notion of a stable American identity, exposing the American Dream as an illusion produced by the inherent heteronormativity of the entertainment industry. The film advocates a cosmopolitan model of cultural hybridity and the plurality of identities by shedding light on the faultlines of nationalist essentialism.
Revisionist Spectacle? Theatrical Remediation in Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman and Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight This article argues that the remediation of theatrical elements in film, i.e. the ample employment of non-systemic signs through the cinematic filter, facilitates a critical engagement with the medial properties of film. While theatrical production has expanded into the realm of film in recent years through mediatization and live broadcasting, a similar, yet inverse, development can be observed in film: Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) and Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (2015) are just two out of many examples showing cinema's tendency of emulating live performance. The films' illusions of liveness cannot be upheld, however, and are broken by the employment of cinematic signs. As such, theatrical films foreground their constructedness and negotiate the impossibility of recreating liveness on screen; they draw attention to their status as spectacles and in a society increasingly dependent on mediatization within a capitalist context. Taking into account the semiosis of theater and film, respectively, the article thus establishes that semiotic transitions, as described above, manifest themselves in genre transgressions: In ways reminiscent of Brechtian theater, The Hateful Eight and Birdman forge critical awareness towards their screened representations; theatricality, therefore, accentuates the perceived naturalization of generic conventions in film (in this case a western and an action/superhero film), and marks them as constructs precisely because the use of theatrical elements does not play into audience's expectations. By extension, the article analyzes the political dimension of these films and asks whether spectacles, famously theorized by Guy Debord as inherently tautological and uncritical products of mediatized mass cultures, are able to comment on the system they emerge from and whether they can effectively revision the conventions of generic film.
What is drag? (How) can we understand drag performance beyond gender? Given the growing trend in drag performance towards the un/gendered non/post/in/human, we reconsider what, precisely, makes a performance drag. Integrating insights from queer theory, performance studies and critical posthumanism, this editorial develops a framework to not only provide an orientation to the individual contributions of this Special Issue, but also argue for a larger theoretical turn in drag scholarship. We consider the composite materiality of and relationship between the human performer and their posthuman drag, and propose that the act of dragging, which can use, but does not exclusively rely on gender, constitutes a more expansive queer performance modality that makes the familiar strange, yet allows for recognition in what is otherwise unintelligible. Posthuman drag celebrates the abject, the marginal and the un/imaginable, shifts the focus from disaster to potentiality and imagines a future in which queers can be human.
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Review of: Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender-Bending, Meredith Heller (2020) Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 233 pp., ISBN 978-1-35008-294-6, h/bk, $85.00 ISBN 978-0-25304-565-2, p/bk, $25.00 ISBN 978-0-25304-567-6, e-book, $12.99
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