Queer in the Limelight: The Aesthetic Politics of Gregg Araki

Abstract

This essay explores critical attitudes leveled at the independent filmmaker Gregg Araki following his early prestige as a father of the New Queer Cinema Movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through a close analysis of "The Doom Generation" (1995) and "Mysterious Skin" (2004), I examine how these films intersect with opposing political and academic discourses on queer cinema at the turn of the century when queer subjects began to integrate into the mainstream canon. These films encapsulate significant shifts in Araki’s career and illuminate the aesthetics and narrative structures that attach him to either avant-garde or mainstream commercial cinema tropes, aspects that critics often view as indicators of a clear trajectory that they wished to see in the director's career. In his unbound relationship to the genres and polemic sentiments that he is so often confined to by critics, I contend that Araki's work dabbles in an ambiguous homosocial territory that dominant discourses about the markers of radical queer cinema and the politics of taste have left obscured.