Queering the Screen - Reflections on Brit. film and tv

Because watching Victim at 2 a.m. counts as praxis.

[semioticsin4k]

Scene 6: Beyond the symbol, into the self

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Does the way we look at trans lives on screen change depending on how close the camera allows us to be?

Watching The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, 2015) and Boy Meets Girl (BBC, 2015) demonstrates how much media shapes the way trans stories are told. The Danish Girl is a biographical drama inspired by one of the first known people to go through with gender affirming surgery, while Boy Meets Girl is a heartwarming rom-com featuring a trans woman. By watching these two texts quite closely together, I became very aware of the difference in how the two characters are portrayed. In The Danish Girl, we, as viewers, are always at a noticeable distance from Lili Elbe’s emerging identity; the visual style the film uses, such as soft focus lenses, pastel costumes, and gentle camera movement, frames Lili as a symbol of transness, making her feel untouchable instead of relatable. Viviane Namaste (2005) argues that trans lives are often “symbolised rather than recognised,” and Hooper's reliance on visual delicacy does exactly this. Namaste’s argument is also greatly supported by the fact that the person playing Lili is a cisgender male actor, which not only (in my opinion) defeats the whole purpose of trans representation in media, as it frames trans womanhood as a ‘performance’, but also deprives trans actresses of already limited opportunities.

On the other hand, Boy Meets Girl’s protagonist, Judy, is played by a trans actress, instantly making it feel much more authentic, as Judy is not metaphorical or symbolic; she’s a person. The camera gets up close to her while she goes about the ordinariness of daily life, and we follow her as she deals with the awkwardness of dates, family, and love. Glyn Davis (2009) describes television as a medium capable of creating “queer intimacies of the everyday,” and Boy Meets Girl is the perfect embodiment of this. The contrast between these two works reveals how medium shapes representation: where film might elevate and stylise, television can domesticate and humanise.

Sometimes the most radical act of representation is simply allowing someone to be seen up close 

[semioticsin4k]

Scene 5: Unearthing queer past

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Is queerness a disruption of the past or a reminder that history isn't as straight as we’ve been told?

Penda’s Fen (Alan Clarke, 1974) is like a history glitch; the rural landscape is more than just the backdrop, it becomes the scene of revelation for Steven’s awakening, as if it were speaking to us and to him. The hills and the fields become a space where everything Steven has ever known - his beliefs about his country, his religion, and his sexuality - begin to unravel. He has visions of Angels and demons, and the ancient King, which destabilise the orderly history he grew up learning, liberating him from the notion that everything should be confined to knowledge. We see the blurring of boundaries between good and evil, sex and religion, gender, sexuality, and dreams and reality, and the instability underneath ideas of purity of tradition. Halberstam’s (2005) notion of “queer time”, a temporality that refuses straight progress, represents Steven’s journey, as it doesn't follow a linear path but instead, like I said before, is a glitch of revelations; it erupts and reforms through visions that collapse the past and the present. 

Watching Ammonite (Francis Lee, 2020) shortly after reinforced these ideas. Instead of approaching queer history through political statements, Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison's relationship unfolds in a world where there is no physical evidence of queer Women existing. The landscape - the sea, cliffs, and the fossils serves as a metaphor for all the lives that were erased, and the film uses this as a tool to unearth this hidden history, by using extreme close ups of fossils you get to see them revealed in fragments, much like queer history, while on the other hand, the wide shots of the vast landscape show how history overwhelms individuals, especially the queer ones who leave no written trace. Heather Love (2007) argues that queer history is shaped by loss, erasure, and the fragments left behind. Ammonite portrays this by creating an emotional space where queer desire can exist among the gaps instead of claiming to recover hidden truths. These two films help us understand how queering the past isn't about imposing something new onto history but acknowledging what has always been there, even if it wasn't recognized or accepted at the time. 

We are reminded that the past was never straight in the first place it was simply written by who was allowed to speak 

[semioticsin4k]

Scene 3: Soft moments, Queer truths

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Is queerness sometimes most visible in the soft moments, a glance, a pause, a touch, rather than in any spoken confession?

I watched Queers (BBC, 2017) in the first week of this module; each episode features a character alone in a room, basically telling a story. This approach - using monologue - makes queerness feel intimate and close; they are filled with small movements, glances, and gestures that reveal much more than what they’re actually saying, inviting you to read between the lines and ‘queer’ what you’re seeing and hearing. ‘Missing Alice’, for example, is an episode that was written to mark 50 years since the 1967 sexual offences act, where Alice talks about her gay husband. Her body language - her stiffness portrays her as someone who has learnt to keep everything in, small hand movements voicing her anxiety, breaking eye contact when she edges towards the truth - conveys the fear and heartbreak of loving a man she will never fully reach and exposes what I like to call the ‘invisible’ Women of queer history, the wives who knew and therefore lived their lives restrained by laws that werent even about them. Glyn Davis’s (2009) idea of “queer intimacies of the everyday”: queerness expressed not through spectacle, but through small, human gestures that carry emotional truth, echoes these small instances we see in the monologues. 

Recently watching God’s Own Country (Francis Lee, 2017) made me come back to these episodes of Queers (BBC, 2017), where in one we get monologues, the other gives us silence. Johnny and Gheorge say very little at the beginning; instead, queerness pokes through touch and the space they share. Their intimacy isn’t addressed aloud, but felt in their rhythm and glances. I felt these two texts could be connected through their commitment to subtlety, to the little, personal moments in which queer experience comes to light, not through dramatic turning points, but through the everyday textures of life. 

Queerness isn’t always loud; sometimes it's whispered through the softness of being seen. 

[semioticsin4k]

Scene 2: Beauty in the unknown

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What if the most honest way to experience queerness on film is through uncertainty, not clarity?

In Only Make Believe (Robert Knights, 1973), theatricality is used as a disruptive approach. Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performative helps illuminate this dynamic — identity is not innate but produced through repetition. The use of mirrors, repetition, and multiple identities gives off the feeling of instability, blurring the line between the stage and ‘reality’. For Ellis Hanson (1999), queerness often emerges in style and excess, when cinema chooses artifice over order, spectacle over certainty. 

Knights is constantly reminding us that we’re watching a play within a play; his conscious expressiveness does exactly this: it exposes performance as a framework of identity, reminding us that desire, like acting, is something continually rehearsed and reimagined. What Hanson (1999) calls ‘artifice’: the exaggeration and awareness of performance as a space where queerness can flourish. This self-reflexivity ‘queers’ the form by refusing the idea of stable identity — characters perform their desires as much as they feel them. 

Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) brings that disorientation into the horror genre. Set inside a cheap post-production studio, it replaces on-screen violence with the physical work of creating horror through sound; we are only really shown half of the whole film, creating a sense of uncertainty and unease for us as viewers. Strickland also plays on a sort of gory desire, where we are intrigued by what we can't see, but at the same time, not sure if we want to see it. Something else that adds to this dissatisfaction is the way the narrative is clearly not structured, building what Halberstam (2005) would call a “queer time and space,” where chronology is ruptured and reality dissolves. The protagonist, Gilderoy, becomes psychologically trapped in the world he is trying to create, serving as a metaphor for our Own entanglement with media, as we too become absorbed, influenced, and disoriented by what we consume. The film queers cinematic thrill by making us aware of how sound and image manipulate desire and fear; the horror lies in the not knowing. 

Essentially, the queerness emanates from the uncertainty itself, the gaps and the illusions that invite us to feel rather than understand. 

[semioticsin4k]

Scene 1: Hidden in the Frame

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Does queerness only exist in the stories it tells, or does it seep through the form itself?

Let's start from the beginning, with Victim, which, to my understanding, paved the way to British cinema, questioning what ‘normal’ (more like what was considered as normal, because what does ‘normal’ really mean, right?) looked like on screen. It was released in 1961 and is the first British film to address homosexuality openly; however, what makes this truly revolutionary is that it was released 6 years before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales. Meaning it came out during a time of social taboo and bordering on illegal (badass) - this is portrayed in the way the film is framed; a crime thriller, where the crime is homosexuality itself. What I'm getting at is, what’s queer about Victim isn’t the fact that it is addressing homosexuality, but rather how it critiques Society and the law by showing, through the film's lighting and framing (shadows, mirrors, close-ups on half-lit faces) the violence of repression.  

half lit faces

This very nicely contrasts with the film we watched this week, Performance (1970). Fast forward 9 years, and this film explodes all those boundaries, while Victim hides its queerness in coded glances and dark rooms, Performance flaunts it through style; its use of colour, fragmented editing, and sexual ambiguity are the complete opposite of Dearden’s restraint. The lack of clear lines between characters, genders, or moral positions breaks down boundaries in the way Sedgwick (1993) calls “the open mesh of possibilities” (p. 8). The film's structure takes on the role of a visual representation of queerness, not only by portraying desire but embodying it through form. 

What’s “normal” begins to be blurred as they show the transition from hiding queerness to performing it. 

[semioticsin4k]

Fade In: Queering the Screen.

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What does it mean to queer film and television?

Before we get to that, we should know what ‘queer’ means: “having or relating to a gender identity or a sexuality that does not fit society's traditional ideas about gender or sexuality” (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Essentially, ‘queer’ is mostly used as an adjective, which might have you thinking: what does it mean to queer film and television, and how does one go about doing so? Well, that’s where I come in; this blog is a space to think through these questions — not only by explicitly identifying queer stories or characters but by looking into how films and shows themselves might behave queerly. Queerness, as Hall (2003) describes, is not simply about who appears on screen, but about a critical stance — a “strategy of resistance” that questions normativity and the structures that define what counts as normal.

Sometimes, queerness surfaces directly through representation; other times, it peaks through tone, aesthetics, and what we film snobs like to call mise-en-scène (its French 🙄) Sedgwick (1993, p. 3) reminds us that queer theory begins “where the meanings don’t stay still.” To queer, then, is to destabilise, to question, to refuse fixed categories and to interpret film and television against their grain.

Davis and Needham (2009) suggest that queering television involves not only studying queer characters or plots but understanding television itself as a queer medium: one defined by intimacy, repetition, and the everyday. In this blog, I aim to explore these logics, trying to link theory to films and shows I'm studying this term.

Join me in cruising British film and TV, to wander, to pause, to look again, and most importantly to queer everything and anything!!!!