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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
The sex scenes in the critically acclaimed film The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Akhavan, 2018) are structured by interruption and confusion, expectation and potential. The combination of these conflicting qualities lends these sex scenes feelings of liminality and queerness. Focusing on the editing and aesthetics of the sex scenes, this paper will examine how these scenes embody what queer adolescence feels like and how they are designed to generate specific affective pleasures.
The sex scenes in Miseducation move away from the binary of ‘LGBT’ cinema and the traditional narrative finality of the romantic sex scene as essential to the protagonist’s arrival at ‘coming-of-age’ or the similar finality of the ‘coming out’ trope. The lesbian sex scenes in this film play with our expectations of time, sex, and romance and queerness and pleasurable affect are found in the unfixed state of the adolescent lesbian and in the friction between frustration and potential. The film categorises interruption and discovery, rather than finality, as essential to making teenage lesbian sex scenes queer. These sex scenes are driven by a complex assemblage of feeling that queers the structures of normalised sexual behaviours and pleasure by highlighting discovery, exploration, frustration, confusion, and potential rather than romantic climax. By examining the aesthetics of these sex scenes we can pinpoint the specificities and pleasures of these queer affects.
Queer time, queer feeling and queer sex in The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)
The sex scenes in the critically acclaimed film The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Akhavan, 2018) are structured by interruption and confusion, expectation and potential. The combination of these conflicting qualities lends these sex scenes feelings of liminality and queerness. Focusing on the editing and aesthetics of the sex scenes, this paper will examine how these scenes embody what queer adolescence feels like and how they are designed to generate specific affective pleasures.
The sex scenes in Miseducation move away from the binary of ‘LGBT’ cinema and the traditional narrative finality of the romantic sex scene as essential to the protagonist’s arrival at ‘coming-of-age’ or the similar finality of the ‘coming out’ trope. The lesbian sex scenes in this film play with our expectations of time, sex, and romance and queerness and pleasurable affect are found in the unfixed state of the adolescent lesbian and in the friction between frustration and potential. The film categorises interruption and discovery, rather than finality, as essential to making teenage lesbian sex scenes queer. These sex scenes are driven by a complex assemblage of feeling that queers the structures of normalised sexual behaviours and pleasure by highlighting discovery, exploration, frustration, confusion, and potential rather than romantic climax. By examining the aesthetics of these sex scenes we can pinpoint the specificities and pleasures of these queer affects.
Bio
Samantha Colling is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is the author of The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film (2017) and she is currently undertaking a large-scale research project titled Sex in Reality Television: 2000-2020.