John Leo and Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA), 2020

In Queer Timing, Susan Potter offers a counter-history that reorients accepted views of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema. Potter sees the emergence of lesbian figures as only the most visible but belated outcome of multiple sexuality effects. Early cinema reconfigured older erotic modalities, articulated new—though incoherent—sexual categories, and generated novel forms of queer feeling and affiliation.

Potter draws on queer theory, silent film historiography, feminist film analysis, and archival research to provide an original and innovative analysis. Taking a conceptually oriented approach, she articulates the processes of filmic representation and spectatorship that reshaped, marginalized, or suppressed women's same-sex desires and identities. As she pursues a sense of "timing," Potter stages scenes of the erotic and intellectual encounters shared by historical spectators, on-screen figures, and present-day scholars. The result is a daring revision of feminist and queer perspectives that foregrounds the centrality of women's same-sex desire to cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality.

| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Queer Historiography: Suspending Sexual Knowledges 1. Troubling Sexual History: The Anachronistic Lesbian of Pandora's Box 2. Traces, Specks, and Glimmers: Regulating Same-sex Attractions Part II. Bodies: Style, Genre, and Sexual Legibility 3. Queer Character: A Florida Enchantment's Ambivalent Sexual Motivations 4. Mobilizing Genre: The Wild Party's Sexual Kinesthetics Part III. Bonds: Spectatorship and Queer Subjectivities 5. Looking Backward: Loïe Fuller and the Virtual Erotics of Spectatorship 6. Valentino's Lesbianism: Stardom, Spectatorship, and Queer Recognition Coda: Out of Time Notes Bibliography Index Back cover | John Leo and Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA), 2020 — Popular Culture Association (PCA)
|Susan Potter is lecturer in film studies at the University of Sydney.