This discussion will explore formal experimentation as an index for evolving expressions of male homosexuality from literary modernism to contemporary cinema. In so doing, it will expose a tradition of flamingly failed passing that is itself a surreptitious mode of passing: the flaunting of gay style as an intentionally unconvincing cover for gay content. While the phenomenon of passing has been surprisingly understudied in queer theory, this book presentation and discussion will expand on foundational conceptualizations of performativity and the closet, suggesting that subjectivity emerges precisely in the margin of error between existing identity models and their imperfect embodiments. Touching on a corpus of queer creatives ranging from Jean Genet to Troye Sivan, this event will intervene in trenchant debates about queer agency and disidentification, wagering that it is precisely in instances of conflict between these auteurs and their inventions that narrative becomes a laboratory for testing the sovereignty and self-determination of queer identity.

Ian Fleishman is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves on the Executive Board of the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. He also holds a secondary appointment as Associate Professor of Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies and affiliations with the Program in Comparative Literature & Theory and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. He has published widely on subjects spanning from the Baroque to contemporary auteur cinema and on a diversity of media ranging from propaganda to video pornography. His first monograph, An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino (Northwestern University Press, 2017) was awarded the Northeast Modern Language Association’s annual book prize. More recently, with Iggy Cortez, he coedited a volume on Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh, 2023). His second monograph, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing, appeared in December 2024 (Northwestern University Press).

Nicolas Helm-Grovas is a Postdoctoral Fellow at ICI Berlin. Previously he was Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. His book Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-cinema is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series published by Brill and Haymarket. His writing has appeared in publications such as Oxford Art Journal, Radical Philosophy, Trafic: Almanach de Cinéma, New Left Review: Sidecar, and in various edited collections. With Oliver Fuke he has organized several exhibitions related to Mulvey and Wollen’s work, most recently Intersections in Theory, Film and Art at Camera Austria in Graz in 2022. With Kodwo Eshun and Oliver Fuke he is currently editing a three-volume collection of writings by Peter Wollen.

Annie Ring is Associate Professor of German and Film at University College London. She previously worked at Emmanuel College, Cambridge as Research Fellow in 2012–15 and Director of Studies in German in 2013–14. She is the author of the monographs After the Stasi (Bloomsbury, 2015), and The Lives of Others (BFI Film Classics, 2022) and co-editor of Architecture and Control (Brill, 2018), Uncertain Archives (The MIT Press, 2021) and Citational Media (Legenda Visual Culture, 2024). She has published widely on literature and film, and cultural theories of the ‘digital’, surveillance, subjectivity and technology in journals including Surveillance & Society, Seminar, German Life and Letters, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Oxford German Studies and Paragraph, as well as in edited volumes published in the US, UK, Denmark, and Germany. She sits on the steering group of the German Screen Studies Network and the editorial board of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory.

This talk is an attempt to clarify a longstanding controversy in the history of humanities scholarship in the university, namely its relation to political activism, and to the political in general. Guillory’s hypothesis is that the appropriate frame for understanding this relation is the autonomy of social spheres, as expressed in the historical tendency of different spheres to become depoliticized over time. The paradigm case for this tendency is the depoliticization of the religious sphere with the end of the wars of religion at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He argues that depoliticization enabled the development of autonomous social spheres, resulting in many social benefits, beginning with the condition of peace following the wars of religion. At the same time, autonomous social spheres are periodically subject to re-politicization for various reasons, a tendency manifest in university scholarship at the present moment. Guillory examines several recent arguments defending the identity of scholarship with political activism, attempting to grasp thereby the forces impelling politicization and depoliticization.

John Guillory is an US-American scholar and literary critic best known for his books Cultural Capital (1993) and Professing Criticism. Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022). He is the Julius Silver Professor of English Emeritus at New York University. His research focuses on rhetoric, the sociology of criticism, the history of the humanities, and early media studies.