Over the corporate rainbow: LGBTQ film festivals and affective media networks

Abstract

ABSTRACT Contemporary LGBTQ film festivals are often held to a standard of nostalgic radicalism based in U.S. independent film cultures of the early nineties, and found diluted and assimilationist as a result. In an effort to track the complex circulation of affect still present within LGBTQ film festivals, this article troubles this critique of commodification and investigates the networking of LGBTQ film festival affect amongst contexts of significant socio-historical importance like group belonging, pride, and activism. I offer the concept affective media network to consider the organization of public feeling emergent from the negotiated emotional orientation attendees experience through films, corporate installations, and various festival events, each with differing relationships to LGBTQ history. Reading festivals as affective media networks allows us to see them as the unique public spheres they are – mediated spaces of community, ritual, and history that reflect the desires of a specific place and time. Using participant observation methodologies, I focus on Outfest, the premiere LGBTQ film festival in Los Angeles. Paying particular attention to the aggregate of Outfest’s rainbow iconography, and its curation of programmed space, I frame the LGBTQ film festival as an ambivalent space mediating nostalgia for the past against the hope of the future.