4 - Audiences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
There are three sets of audience which this chapter intends to analyse: readers and LGBT bookshop goers who are also DVD buyers and cinema goers; web-based queer ‘followings’ (of film-makers and of types of film); and festival audiences. In line with the findings of Pujol Ozonas on cinephilia and anticipating a straightforward assumption that underlies my next chapter – that no queer person's cultural participation is dedicated solely to cinema – I begin by looking at queer cinephiles who are also readers or, at least, browsers and purchasers of books and magazines as well as DVDs. The notion of an interpretive community, indeed, famously surfaces in modern critical discourse in relation to texts (Fish 1980) and is later extensively used in discussions of science fiction, and other fan-targeted narrative genres in print and fan fiction on the Internet (Hellekson and Busse 2006; Hills 2002). Attention to the web-based audiences allows a mapping of the formation of queer interpretive communities, and the festivals offer an entry point for considering also ‘wished-for interpretive communities’, audiences, that is, ‘wish[ing] to be part of certain kinds of community’, a wish which ‘shapes how they want to employ their imaginations around the film[s]’ (Barker 2011). Both sets of audience manifest and construct identities and differences prompted by questions of taste, desire, commitment, political inclination, wish or fantasy in line with the dynamics of cinephilia (Pujol Ozonas 2011: 17-19); they might also be expected to resist the heteronormative context of mainstream cinephilia, which Pujol Ozonas argues is particularly acute in Spain (19-21) and which privileges the codes, tastes, habitats (the Filmoteca art houses and resources) and the sense of humour of the straight male (19).
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- Information
- Spanish Queer Cinema , pp. 91 - 122Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012