Society of Scholars Cohort Archive

Cruising the Cityscape: Queer Temporality and the Translation of Space in Contemporary East Asian Cinema

This dissertation explores the way in which queer cinema negotiates the normativizing process of hyper-modernity in contemporary East Asia. It suggests that queer Asian cinema has developed as a collective cinematic mode as a counterforce to the intensifying neoliberalism and neo-nationalism in the region since the Asian economic crisis. By focusing on these cinemas’ stylistic investment in the non-normative representation of temporality and space, as well as their representation of counter-progressive movements such as retrospection, repetition, and strolling, it argues that queer cinema has functioned as an artistic mode of resistance to the violence of progressive time as a technology that propels the ideology of development.