Negotiated Viewing: Locating Queerness in Mid-Century American Cinema

Abstract

This project attempts to challenge mid-century American cinema's status as heterocentric by encouraging a different kind of relationship between this cinema and queer audiences through the use of a viewing practice I will refer to as negotiated viewing, or the act of locating queerness in the product and production of traditionally "straight" or heterosexual coded films. This project examines and demonstrates the process and purpose of this practice through the following written work as well as the cultivation of a companion, virtual exhibit that identifies two specific sites of queerness in mid-century films. The first, films starring actresses Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich from 1930-1936. The second, films produced by Metro Goldwyn Mayer's Arthur Freed unit between 1939-1962 (though this work focuses on the years 1943-1948). This project argues that the labor of queer creatives in the production of a film determines the presence of an inherent queerness, locatable by queer audiences in its final product. In specifying these two groups of films in my work, I am looking to explore the ways queerness is constructed, embodied, and ultimately identified, interrogating the relationship between content and viewer and the value or role of representation in positively affirming the existence of sexual and gender variance.