Gender-Assemblages and the Case of BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival

Abstract

Established in 1986 as a stand-alone season of lesbian and gay cinema, ‘BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival’ is Britain’s largest and longest-running queer film festival. A complex and unstable confluence of culture, politics, sociality, and affect, this queer cultural organisation represents a particularly rich research context, one marked by its epistemological productivity and reflexivity. This thesis explores its historical production of gender politics by analysing multiple dimensions of the organisation. Film, while central to the queer film festival’s politics, represents just one dimension of its political productivity. This study analyses three dimensions of the festival in order to extrapolate, correlate, and map its historical-epistemological relationship towards gender politics. I examine the discourse of its organisers; the commercial materials, title changes, and spatiality it annually produces or temporarily occupies; and the relational, more-than-textual politics of its curation. To theorise the complex and often contradictory political significations produced by, through, and across the queer film festival, I utilise the concept of ‘assemblage’: a versatile and dynamic theory of social ontology widely taken up in queer theory. By harnessing assemblage philosophy and placing it into dialogue with the heterogeneous dimensions of the queer film festival, this investigation presents a revitalised approach to analysing and identifying the multifarious contours of the queer film festival’s political productivity, demonstrating not only how gender politics are historically produced within this space but also how they are subject to reflexive self-examination and organisational destabilisation. The ideas explored and findings presented here seek to contribute to various critical fields, including British queer cultural history, (film) Festival Studies, and queer-feminist philosophy. In doing so, this thesis offers practical insights into the organisational operations of BFI Flare in its traversal of a highly unstable identitarian landscape.