Coming Out to the Mainstream: New Queer Cinema in the 21st Century

Coming Out to the Mainstream is a collection of essays written from a range of perspectives, from scholars to film producers, who seek to contextualize and reframe New Queer Cinema from a 21st century perspective-decades after Stonewall, the emergence of the HIV-AIDS crisis, and the initial years of the gay marriage movement. These essays situate themselves in the 21st century as an attempt to assess what appears to be a mainstreaming of New Queer Cinema, a current wave of New Queer Cinema film that holds potential for influencing film viewers beyond the original limits of an independent film audience, critics, and the academy. Specifically, these essays examine whether and how the filmmaking styles and themes of New Queer Cinema have been mainstreamed-rendered familiar as points of interest in popular culture of the 21st century, challenging a queer-phobic cultural climate, and providing an incisive set of visual representations that can help inform continuing debates over queerness in public culture. For instance, what do we make of the burgeoning number of queer stories that are circulating not just in arthouses but in mainstream media? How much of a transformation in our collective sensibilities does this trend represent, and will it carry us toward a cultural landscape where identity is commonly understood and valued as multiple, fluid, and performative? While the editors of this collection find there is significant evidence that New Queer Cinema has achieved success in forging greater mainstream acceptance of queer perspectives in cinema and everyday culture, the essays we present offer a variety of voices, a timely set of observations on queer images in film, television, and popular culture.

JoAnne C. Juett (PhD) is Assistant Professor (Scientific and Technical Writing), English Department, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and currently serves as UWEC Instructional Technology Fellow. She specializes and publishes in the areas of scientific and technical communication, arts and technology, and digital literacy, and she also researches and teaches in the areas of women’s studies and religious studies. Dr. Juett has been awarded numerous grants, including ones from the ARCUS Gay and Lesbian Foundation and The E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, through which she focuses on LGBT communication and youth issues. David M. Jones (PhD) is an Associate Professor of African American Literature and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and is currently serving as Faculty Fellow for the University Honors Program. His scholarship interests include social movements in American cultural history, literary regionalism, and American popular music. Dr. Jones has published essays on gender identity in the civil rights movement, musician Etta James, and blues music in postmodern culture, and he has produced and hosted programs on popular music and Wisconsin culture for Wisconsin Public Radio. Dr. Jones is also a professional musician.