This book is born out of a paradox: while scholars have increasingly legitimated festivals as a semi-independent field of research within film and media studies, critics and arts organizers have long questioned the cultural relevancy of LGBTQ festivals. As early as 1982, Thomas Waugh wondered why (and whether) a new gay and lesbian film festival should be organized in Montreal. Similarly, B. Ruby Rich famously observed that queer festivals have simultaneously been ‘outlasting their mandate and invited to cease and desist’. In focusing on LGBTQ festivals’ conflicted temporalities and historiography, this book examines the disciplinary assumptions that structure festival studies: it questions the theoretical and political narratives implied in current festival scholarship.

In particular, this book is concerned with festival studies’ quest for legitimacy: as a relatively recent field of academic research, festival studies has been burdened with justifying its object of research. Symptomatically, most books and dissertations on the topic start with a numbered description of the festival phenomenon. It is customary to highlight that thousands and thousands of festivals are organized each year. LGBTQ festivals are not an exception: for instance, Ger Zielinski asserts that queer festivals are ‘often second largest only to the IFF [International Film Festivals] in their respective city’. Similarly, Skadi Loist argues that ‘the LGBT/Q film festival scene has grown exponentially, covering most regions of the globe with about 230 active events on the circuit today’. The tendency to rely on statistics and to map out what has been coined as the festival circuit can difficultly be avoided: it justifies the relevancy of festival scholarship and is symptomatic of an academic climate in which scholars are constantly asked to evaluate the social impact of their research. It does, however, encode a set of assumptions about which festivals matter, take hard numbers as self-evident, and foreclose an examination of what constitutes a festival.

Instead of participating in this collective effort to describe and justify the festival phenomenon, this book is concerned with analyzing the effects of festival studies’ theoretical and methodological frameworks – frameworks that tacitly structure our scholarship but are never fully acknowledged.