Abstract

Chapter 4 pays attention to LGBTQ festivals’ visual productions and curatorial practices. As events dedicated to the screening of sexual images, LGBTQ festivals are enmeshed with the accumulation of temporality and affects. As such, their film selection is akin to a collage or a juxtaposition of films, each with a peculiar relationship to history. Through their selections and visual productions, festivals make time ‘matter’: they constitute a virtual archive and entail a particular type of relationship with gay and lesbian visual history. In positing that festivals constitute an ideal space for theorizing gay and lesbian spectatorship, Chapter 4 argues that LGBTQ festivals exemplify some of the modalities through which we access, visually, gay and lesbian cultural memory.

Keywords: temporality; festivals; curation; identity; visual architectures; virtual archives; queer historiography

‘Culture requires memory. Memory requires archives.’

‘Every genealogy is a fiction […] It is a queer imaging that traverses friendship and gossip, strolls through the archives on a Sunday afternoon, and so much more. The archives is a fiction. Nobody knows that better than queers – people who have had to cope with the fiction of a socially prescribed straightness. Queers make up genealogies and worlds.’