Sydney Film Talks: Queer Cinema, Realism, and Futurity

The Discipline of Film Studies is proud to present Prof Geoffrey Maguire, who will speak on "The Queer Art of Feeling: Futurity, Fin de siglo and New Queer Realism"

All welcome! Abstract and bio below.

Geoffrey Maguire, "The Queer Art of Feeling: Futurity, Fin de siglo and New Queer Realism"

This paper takes Lucio Castro’s Fin de siglo (End of the Century, 2019) as a paradigmatic example of broader formal and aesthetic shifts in recent queer world film, most notably towards narrative slowness, a lack of dramatic tension, and an intimate focus on the quotidian realities of queer lives. I draw on the frameworks of new queer realism and queer futurity to contend that the screening of queer lives in a more realistic, observational manner is not a refusal of politics but rather a recalibration of the politics of queer representation for the contemporary period.

Geoffrey Maguire is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, and is currently a Hunt-Simes Visiting Chair of Sexuality Studies at SSSHARC. He is the author of The Politics of Postmemory (2017), New Visions of Adolescence (2018), and Bodies of Water (2024). His current research project engages with queer theory and the environmental humanities, and is entitled Un/Natural: Marine Sexualities and the Queer Ecological.