Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema

This exciting and original volume offers the first comprehensive critical study of the recent profusion of European films and television addressing sexual migration and seeking to capture the lives and experiences of LGBTIQ+ migrants and refugees.Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema argues that embodied cinematic representations of the queer migrant, even if at times highly ambivalent and contentious, constitute an urgent new repertoire of queer subjectivities and socialities that serve to undermine the patrolled borders of gender and sexuality, nationhood and citizenship, and refigure or queer fixed notions and universals of identity like ‘Europe’ and national belonging based on the model of the family. At stake ethically and politically is the elaboration of a ‘transborder’ consciousness and aesthetics that counters the homonationalist, xenophobic and homo/trans-phobic representation of the ‘migrant to Europe’ figure rooted in the toxic binaries of othering (the good vs bad migrant, host vs guest, indigenous vs foreigner). Bringing together 16 contributors working in different national film traditions and embracing multiple theoretical perspectives, this powerful and timely collection will be of major interest to both specialists and students in Film and Media Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Migration/Mobility Studies, Cultural Studies, and Aesthetics.

"Offering rich analyses of films from a broad geographical area … the collection as a whole constitutes an important intervention with crucial societal implications … they collectively demonstrate how European films featuring queer border crossers prompt crucial questions about traditional concepts of nation, identity, and belonging, thus inviting and aiding in the development of a transnational consciousness that might transcend the xenophobic, homophobic, and homonationalist currents asserting themselves with increasing force in several areas of Europe at present." Film Quarterly (74:04), "Offering rich analyses of films from a broad geographical area … the collection as a whole constitutes an important intervention with crucial societal implications … they collectively demonstrate how European films featuring queer border crossers prompt crucial questions about traditional concepts of nation, identity, and belonging, thus inviting and aiding in the development of a transnational consciousness that might transcend the xenophobic, homophobic, and homonationalist currents asserting themselves with increasing force in several areas of Europe at present."- Film Quarterly (74:04)

James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of (among others) The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras (1997), The Cinema of Jean Cocteau (2006), Jean Cocteau (a ‘Critical Life’) (2008), Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (2013) and Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (2016). He is also co-editor of The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985–2000 (2000), Gender and French Cinema (2001), For Ever Godard: The Cinema of Jean-Luc Godard (2004), Jean-Luc Godard. Documents (2006) (catalogue of the Godard exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris) and May ‘68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution (2011). His most recent monograph, Ethics and Aesthetics of African Cinema: The Politics of Beauty, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019.