Queer/Adaptation - A Collection of Critical Essays

This collection of essays illuminates the intersection of queer and adaptation. Both adaptation and queerness suffer from the stereotype of being secondary: to identify something as an adaptation is to recognize it in relation to something else that seems more original, more authentic. Similarly, to identify something as queer is to place it in relation to what is assumed to be "normal" or "straight." This ground-breaking volume brings together fifteen original essays that critically challenge these assumptions about originality, authenticity, and value. The volume is organized in three parts: The essays in Part I examine what happens when an adaptation queers its source text and explore the role of the author/screenwriter/director in making those choices. The essays in Part II look at what happens when filmmakers push against boundaries of various kinds: time and space, texts and bodies, genres and formats. And the essays in Part III explore adaptations whose source texts cannot be easily pinned down, where there are multiple adaptations, and where the adaptation process itself is queer. The book includes discussion of a wide variety of texts, including opera, classic film, genre fiction, documentary, musicals, literary fiction, low-budget horror, camp classics, and experimental texts, providing a comprehensive and interdisciplinary introduction to the myriad ways in which queer and adaptation overlap. 

List of contents

1. Queer/Adaptation: An Introduction, Pamela Demory.- Part I: Adapting as Queering/Queering as Adapting.- 2. Emancipating Madame Butterfly, Nick Bamford.- 3. Queering Agatha Christie: Barry Sandler's Camp Adaptation of The Mirror Crack'd, Tison Pugh.- 4. The Queer Aesthetics of Tom Ford's Film Adaptations: A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals, Scott Stoddart.- 5. Hannibal: Beginning to Bloom, Mat Daniel.- Part II: Bodies, Time and Space.- 6. Moonlight, Adaptation, and Queer Time, Pamela Demory.- 7. Adaptation as Queer Touching in The Safety of Objects: Transgressing the Boundaries of Bodies and Texts, Chiara Pellegrini.- 8. Fuck-Scripting: Becoming-Queer in Interior. Leather Bar, Jerry Thomas.- 9. Adapting Queer Shorts to Feature Films: Does Size Really Matter?, Whitney Monaghan and Stuart Richards.- 10. Transnational Slash: Korean Drama Formats, Boys' Love Fanfic, and the Place of Queerness in East Asian Media Flows, John Lessard.- Part III: Queerer and Queerer: Promiscuity and Multiplicity.- 11. Queer Many Ways: Ulrike Ottinger's Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984), Shannon Brownlee.- 12. Blood Doubles: A Renegotiation of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla on Film, Shelby Wilson.- 13. Hitchcock Goes to Italy and Spain: Euro-Horror and Queer Adaptation, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns.- 14. Dazzle, Gradually: A 'Tru" Account of Adapting Capote's In Cold Blood, Michael Perez.- 15. Willful Infidelities: Camping Camille, Jamie Hook.

About the author

Pamela Demory is on the faculty of the University of California at Davis, USA. She has published numerous articles on both film adaptation and queer film and television, including “Queer Adaptation,” in The Routledge Companion to Adaptation Studies (2018).  She is the co-editor of Queer Love in Film and Television (Palgrave 2013) and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Popular Culture.

Summary

This collection of essays illuminates the intersection of queer and adaptation. Both adaptation and queerness suffer from the stereotype of being secondary: to identify something as an adaptation is to recognize it in relation to something else that seems more original, more authentic. Similarly, to identify something as queer is to place it in relation to what is assumed to be “normal” or “straight.” This ground-breaking volume brings together fifteen original essays that critically challenge these assumptions about originality, authenticity, and value. The volume is organized in three parts: The essays in Part I examine what happens when an adaptation queers its source text and explore the role of the author/screenwriter/director in making those choices. The essays in Part II look at what happens when filmmakers push against boundaries of various kinds: time and space, texts and bodies, genres and formats. And the essays in Part III explore adaptations whose source texts cannot be easily pinned down, where there are multiple adaptations, and where the adaptation process itself is queer. The book includes discussion of a wide variety of texts, including opera, classic film, genre fiction, documentary, musicals, literary fiction, low-budget horror, camp classics, and experimental texts, providing a comprehensive and interdisciplinary introduction to the myriad ways in which queer and adaptation overlap. 

Report

"Eschewing moralistic connotations associated with LGBTQ lives, here, promiscuity unyokes binaries of sexuality and gender, while alluding to the intellectual pleasure and possible 'erotic charge' of intertextual engagement. By extension, queer/adaptation scholarship should stimulate similar responses; so, in an act of critical promiscuity I read, viewed, or re-experienced all of the material I could locate, seeking pleasure by matching my observations with those of the essayists." (David Pellegrini, Adaptation, August 14, 2020)

Product details

• Assisted by: Pamel Demory (Editor), Pamela Demory (Editor)
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.01.2019
• EAN: 9783030053055
• ISBN: 978-3-0-3005305-5
• No. of pages: 268
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 218 mm x 22 mm
• Weight: 504 g
• Illustrations: XVII, 268 p. 30 illus., 28 illus. in color.
• Series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture; Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV