David A. Gerstner

How do we identify the "queer auteur" and their queer imaginings? Is it possible to account for such a figure when the very terms "queer" and "auteur" invoke aesthetic surprises and disorientations, disconcerting ironies and paradoxes, and biographical deceits and ambiguities? In eighteen eloquent chapters, David A. Gerstner traces a history of ideas that spotlight an ever-shifting terrain associated with auteur theory and, in particular, queer-auteur theory. Engaging with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, Jean Louis Baudry, Linda Nochlin, Jane Gallop, Cáel Keegan, Luce Irigaray, and other prominent critical thinkers, Gerstner contemplates how the queer auteur in film theory might open us to the work of desire.

Queer Imaginings argues for a queer-auteur in which critical theory is reenabled to reconceptualize the auteur in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and desire. Gerstner succinctly defines the contours of a history and the ongoing discussions that situate queer and auteur theories in film studies. Ultimately, Queer Imaginings is a journey in shared pleasures in which writing for and about cinema makes way for unanticipated cinematic friendships.

In this volume, media and film scholars explore the theoretical debates around authorship, intention, and identity within the rapidly transforming industry of new media. Defining media broadly-from visual arts to videogames, from textiles to television-contributors consider how artists, designers, do-it-yourselfers, media professionals, scholars, and others decide who has the right to claim authorship. They ask which institutional prerogatives and legal debates around intellectual property rights, fair use, and copyright have a bearing on concepts of authorship in 'new media.' By addressing these issues, Media Authorship demonstrates how the age-old concept of an artwork's creator, as formulated eons ago, for instance, in written works or paintings, is now being contested and rethought by new practices in the digital media environment. 

Selected as Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2012

Queer Pollen discusses three notable black queer twentieth-century artists-painter and writer Richard Bruce Nugent, author James Baldwin, and filmmaker Marlon Riggs'and the unique ways they turned to various media to work through their experiences living as queer black men. Gerstner elucidates the complexities in expressing queer black desire through traditional art forms such as painting, poetry, and literary prose or in the industrial medium of cinema. This challenge is made particularly sharp when the terms 'black' and 'homosexuality' come freighted with white ideological conceptualizations. 

Covering gay, lesbian, transsexual, and queer life and culture since 1945, this compendium also offers contributors who include activists, journalists, scholars, and others, representing divergent views and constituencies. Entries are grouped with such categories as health, same-sex marriage/civil unions, education, dance, film, music, performance, politics, homophobia, and the impact of the AIDS epidemic internationally. Cross-referenced; bibliography provided. 

Gerstner fathoms the decisive part played by film in constructing a masculine ideal of American life in his reassessments of such early movies as Manhatta (1921) by J. Stuart Blackton and Theodore Roosevelt; Within Our Gates (1920) by Oscar Micheaux; and Cabin in the Sky (1943) by Vincente Minnelli. He explains how filmmakers forged a national aesthetic that equated democracy with masculinity. Gerstner observes the emergence of an aesthetic of cultural excess that united white and African American cultural enterprises-commonly gay-and problematized the equation of national arts with masculinity.