A New Queer Trinity: A Semiotic, Genre Theory, and Auto-Ethnographic Examination of Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival

摘要

This doctoral study concerns itself with the visual representations of The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (a.k.a. Reeling) with specific attention paid to their marketing campaign materials, as exemplified by the annually created festival POSTER. It is my aim to situate these posters alongside the historical contexts of queer identity, socio-political advocacy, and LGBTQ+ cinema. This analysis will navigate the 36-year period of the festival organization's existence, providing key, in-depth interrogations into the decades, images, and trends both visual and narrative. My unpacking and theoretical discussions of the festival's visual culture has been informed by the practices of semiotics and film genre theory. These methods were employed to answer the primary research question: How have the POSTER advertisements, as visual signifiers for The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, symbolized their organization's mission, represented queer identities, and engaged with the politically contested history of queer cinematic representation?.;Through the analytical process, a series of emergent sub-questions materialized: 1) How have visual representations of The Chicago Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival changed over time? 2) How does the festival POSTER, as a promise of subsequent programming, reflect and/or resist the historical, generic, trajectory of LGBTQ+ cinema? 3) How has the festival organization and its corresponding representations responded to fluctuating political movements and their gradual commercialization?.;Each of the preceding questions provided a distinct vantage point, and allowed me to examine the problems of representation from varying perspectives. This result serves to elucidate the value and significance of such images for the greater LGBTQ+ community which the Reeling event presumes to serve. The film festival as a cultural institution (re)produces visual histories which can have a crucial effect upon their audience, the queer film festival's (re)presentations even more so. As a queer woman and former Reeling intern, I was an invested participant and as a result, this project has been as informed by my subjective engagement with the material as my understanding and incorporation of the ideas and contributions of other voices.;Finally, this project calls for future research into the queer festival construct, a historically significant contributor to queer communities that remains relatively unexplored. The significant investment of time, scrutiny, and deconstruction of queer images created by mainstream, heteronormative culture, while necessary, needs to be supplemented by a greater investment into those images created within queer cultural institutions.