Class #3: Queer and now and
Theory monstrous: queerness, monstrosity,
and [deviant] sexuality
• Perform a reading of the runway scene in The Neon Demon, drawing on
the related concepts of queerness (Sedgwick) and the monster
(Benshoff), and interrogating how this scene makes The Neon Demon
either a “good” or “bad” gay/queer film (Rich). As you unpack this scene,
ask yourself:
Coming attractions
– Is the male gaze – as conceptualized by Mulvey – operative in this
(I) scene? If so, then are either of the two specific strategies/“escape
avenues” offered to the spectator to contain (female) sexual
difference at work in this scene?
– (How) Does Jesse conform to the parameters of the queer monster
as outlined by Benshoff?
– Is TND a “good” or “bad” queer film? Which other scenes would
you cite in your defense of either critical position?
• Perform a reading of the mortuary scene in The Neon Demon, drawing
on the related concepts of queerness (Sedgwick) and the monster
(Benshoff), and interrogating how this scene makes The Neon Demon
either a “good” or “bad” gay/queer film (Rich). As you unpack this scene,
ask yourself:
Coming attractions
– Is the male gaze – as conceptualized by Mulvey – operative in this
(II) scene? If so, then are either of the two specific strategies/“escape
avenues” offered to the spectator to contain (female) sexual
difference at work in this scene?
– (How) Does Ruby conform to the parameters of the queer monster
as outlined by Benshoff?
– Is TND a “good” or “bad” queer film? Which other scenes would
you cite in your defense of either critical position?
“Queer and Now” (Sedgwick)
• Sedgwick begins her analysis of queerness by pointing out that queer writers share a set of
“promises” they made to themselves in childhood, among them “to make invisible
possibilities and desires visible,” and “to challenge queer-eradicating impulses frontally” (3).
Does The Neon Demon keep this promise?
• Why is it, according to Sedgwick, that queer critics “attach intently” to cultural texts, which
become “a prime source of survival” for them (3)?
“Queer and Now” (Sedgwick)
• Homing in on the concept of queer, Sedgwick uses the example of Christmas as a
stand-in for the notion of the family – before casting both as the opposite of/foil for
queerness. Can you unpack her train of thought in tracing these connections?
• In Sedgwick’s analysis of queerness, she finds at work processes of dis-articulation,
un-alignment, dis-engagement; a splitting apart of what heteronormativity
“condense[s] in the notion of sexual identity … as a unitary category” (6).
• In Sedgwick’s formulation of queerness, then, it refers
to “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps,
dissonances and resonances” that make it so that
“Queer and Now” gender and sexuality “(can’t be made) to signify
monolithically” (7).
(Sedgwick) • Why does it remain crucial for Sedgwick that
queerness retain its “definitional center,” and what is
that point of gravity (8)?
• How does Sedgwick differentiate the term queer from
gay and lesbian, and how/why does the former
“signify only when attached to the first person” (8)?
“The Monster and the Homosexual” (Benshoff)
• Benshoff begins by arguing that (a) “homosexuality is a monstrous condition” and
(b) homosexuality – when represented on the screen – has always been “filtered
through the iconography of the horror film” (91).
– What do homosexuality and the monstrous have in common?
– What is the ideological aim of deploying the tropes of horror to represent
homosexuality/homosexual characters?
• If the figure of the monster “can be understood as a metaphoric construct standing
in for the figure of the homosexual” (93), then (how) does the titular metaphor of
the “neon demon” represent homosexuality in TND?
• Following Robin Wood, Benshoff reduces the basic formula of horror films to
“three interrelated variables” (93): which – and how do they operate in TND?
• Benshoff goes on to discuss the differences between textual and sociological
definitions of queerness (94); mapping both of these definitions onto TND, (how)
is the film a queer text?
• Why/how is it that “horror movies and monster movies … actively invoke queer
readings” (ibid.)?
• According to Benshoff, what are the effects of equating/twinning queerness and
the monster/the monstrous – and how do they depend on the reader?
“The Monster and the
Homosexual”
(Benshoff)
• According to Benshoff,
whom does the viewer
typically identify with in
horror films? How do horror
films “link the spectator’s
gaze” to this figure (97)?
• Benshoff rounds out his
article by qualifying his
analysis of queer horror
texts in two ways:
– (a) Queer monsters
“mean different things”
to straight and queer
spectators (ibid.); what
might they mean to
each?
– (b) There are four ways
in which queerness
“intersects with the
horror film” (98): which
– and which hold true
Coda: Glorification, implication and/or critique?
Source: O’Hehir, Andrew. Salon. 23 June 2016. Web. https://bit.ly/2GU22P8.
