Event
Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing by Dr. Fleishman
3420 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA
Dr. Ian Fleishman, Chair of the Cinema & Media Studies Department and a member of the Executive Board at GSWS, will be launching a monograph on queer film and literature, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing.
This book posits formal experimentation as an index for evolving expressions of male homosexuality from literary modernism to the German New Wave and the present day. Ian Fleishman exposes a tradition of flamingly failed passing that is itself a surreptitious mode of passing: the flaunting of queer style as an intentionally unconvincing cover for queer content. Exploring a corpus of films and novels by André Gide, Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, among others, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing intervenes in trenchant debates about queer agency, visibility, negativity, and disidentification. Mapping queer strategies of storytelling onto queer practices of self-invention, Flamboyant Fictions wagers that it is precisely in instances of conflict between these auteurs and their inventions that narrative becomes a laboratory for testing the sovereignty and self-determination of queer identity.
Featured Speaker
Dr. Ian Fleishman is Chair of the new Department of Cinema & Media Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies. He is also affiliated with the Programs in Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies, Comparative Literature & Theory and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. He holds a doctorate in French and German Literature from Harvard, having previously studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin, the Sorbonne Nouvelle and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at Middlebury College in Vermont. He has published in German Quarterly, French Studies, The Germanic Review, Colloquia Germanica, The Journal of Austrian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Mosaic, Environmental Humanities and elsewhere on subjects ranging from the Baroque to contemporary cinema and moving-image pornography.