In Curating Deviance, Marc Francis rekindles queer utopian imaginaries by studying how, from the 1960s through the 1980s, a cadre of programmers and art house theaters brought together a dizzying array of deviant films to create a queer repertory film canon.
In Curating Deviance, Marc Francis scavenges film history for signs of vibrant, wayward life in the film programming of US art house and repertory cinemas between 1968 and 1989. Francis examines how creative and savvy programmers screened films by the likes of John Waters, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Russ Meyer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and a bevy of others in major cities across the United States, forming intertextual constellations in their repertory calendars. These programs allied a dizzying range of sexual and gendered outlaws, including stigmatized practices often overlooked by LGBT-focused queer theory. Curating Deviance reveals how repertory and art cinemas built a coalition of outcasts stigmatized for their taboo desires or identities, rekindling queer utopian imaginaries.
