French Queer Cinema documents forms of contemporary queer representation through coverage of auteur film, pornography and DIY digital video. Whilst there is important scholarship emerging on queer citizenship, identities and sexualities in France (McCaffrey 2005; Provencher 2007), this is the first study of the cultural formation and critical reception of contemporary queer-authored and queer-themed film and video. French Queer Cinema mixes ideological textual analysis with attention to the aesthetic codes and the socio-political context of a wide range of films from the late 1990s onwards. French Queer Cinema also aims to cut across genres by mixing auteur cinema with both...

The first performer in the second DVD of Citébeur’s postcolonial porn series Wesh Cousin (Studio Presse, 2003) bursts through the door of a disaffected warehouse located somewhere outside Paris and points a fake plastic gun at the camera, playfully encouraging us to come watch him masturbate before he goes off to work. The preceding voice-over has introduced the urban consumer to the supposedly sexy underworld of poor, peripheral housing estates, supported elsewhere by the Citébeur iconography containing every possible indicator of urban, lower-class masculinity – the canine logo, mural tags, street-wear, sports gear, bling, fake guns, kick-boxing apparatus, you name...

Amid the World Cup football frenzy in June 2006, Libération titled its Lesbian and Gay Pride edition ‘Mariage et adoption: Les gays près du but’ (‘Marriage and Adoption: Gays close to their goal’). Beyond the cartoon iconography of twinned figurine grooms and meringue brides, Libération heralded a recent shift in political attitudes to LGBT civil rights. In the run-up to the presidential elections of 2007, gay marriage and adoption were being pulled towards the centre of political debate. Following the example of socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s progressive example in Spain, the French socialists finally quietened dissent (from...

This chapter takes up the argument that ‘transgender’ (the umbrella term for transsexuality and queer forms of cross-gender identification including lesbian and gay gender performances of butch and queen) articulates uncertainty as to the categories of gender and sexual identities. The chapter exposes the strains between transgender and lesbian and gay identities in the French context through coverage of queer community-based documentaries (Portrait d’une présidente, 1995; L’Ordre des mots, 2007), and narrative cinema – both mainstream (Mauvais genres, 2001; Ma vie en rose, 1997) and independent (Thelma, 2002), now casting transgender actors in transgender roles. This chapter seeks to contrast...

A few months before the release of Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train, novelist Christophe Honoré wrote an angry dismissal of the moralist tendency of contemporary French cinema, published by Cahiers du cinéma in February 1998. ‘The sad morality of French cinema’ was conceived as a pastiche of François Truffaut’s critique of the so-called tradition of quality, the staid literary adaptations predominant in the 1950s.¹ In his eclectic international pick of the ten best films released in 1997, Honoré did not select a single French production, rejecting the populist social politics dominating realist film, notably Robert Guédiguian’s popular fable Marius...

In his comprehensive overview of both international gay/queer cinema and homosexuality represented through mainstream cinema, Didier Roth-Bettoni mentions not only the filmmakers (Chéreau, Ducastel/Martineau, Lifshitz, Nolot, Ozon, Téchiné) whose output has been covered throughout the preceding chapters, but also lesser known, less mainstream visual artists such as Vincent Dieutre, Alain Guiraudie and the joint output of Pierre Trividic/Patrick Mario Bernard (Roth-Bettoni 2007: 614–18). Roth-Bettoni argues that such peripheral figures offer more radical visions of gay sexuality than is possible within the auteur framework despite their varying forms and preoccupations.

Beyond the straightforward issue of representing homosexuality through the specificity...