Pride and Pudency: Paratextual Domestication and the US DVD Release of Pride

Abstract

In December of 2014, when Pride was released on DVD in the United States, a number of critics and activists criticised discrepancies between the film’s earlier promotional materials and the DVD’s cover, namely the omission of certain details from the synopsis and imagery. Erasing a banner brandishing the slogan ‘gays and lesbians support the miners’ and omitting explicit references to queer people from its synopsis, the DVD’s packaging drew extensive criticism and was labelled an example of ‘straightwashing’ (Child, 2015). As the US DVD release of Pride demonstrates, paratexts, the various ancillary materials that surround a film and its release, harbour the capacity to ‘neutralize and domesticate potential threats a narrative poses to a social or cultural status quo’ (Cavalcante, 2013: 86). Andre Cavalcante explains that whilst materials like promotional posters and DVD covers may be used to ‘highlight themes identified as attractive by marketers and promoters’ such materials may also serve to ‘subvert those [aspects of a film] designated as culturally troubling’ (2013: 87). Reflecting on this latter issue of paratextual domestication and its impact on queer cinema and visibility, this paper takes the US DVD release of Pride as a case study. Analysis of the US DVD cover and the controversy it attracted serves to highlight both the problems with the US DVD release as well as the immense attention and visibility it unintentionally instigated.