| dc.description.abstract | Bertrand Mandico’s Les garçons sauvages (France, 2017) does more than lambast plants as eco-horror hormone monsters (e.g., “They’re turning the frogs gay!”). Deploying a wildly citational praxis as both celebration and critique of queer avant-garde cinema, this film interrogates the use-value of trans/gender in catastrophe mitigation, posing questions environmental humanists and queer/trans scholars might read as: Can the Gynocene really save us from the Anthropocene? Will the white Human survive a gender apocalypse? Mandico’s inter(s)extual mise-en-scène cultivates a complex ecology of texts through formal and diegetic gestures while scrutinizing that textual network’s claims on images of ‘natural’ ecology, or trans and intersex bodies. This intertextual synthesis reveals certain cinematic conceptions of racialized gender as a particularly ecological idea that is already deeply citational, stemming from the queer avant-garde as well as other kinds of more or less established cinema, such as, for example, the Hollywood exploration film and Japanese nuclear horror. This thesis will walk readers through some of Mandico’s persistent citations and their place in an understanding of the queer avant-garde (predominantly in reference to movies by white gay men) as it relates to emerging conceptions of trans* cinema. My goal is to think about the ongoing productivity of citation, and anachronism, to queer and trans cinema and cinema scholars. | |
