Curating Deviance
Programming the Queer Film Canon
$72.29
- Paperback
302 pages
- Release Date
16 February 2026
Summary
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.
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478033080 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1478033088 |
| Author: | Marc Francis |
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Imprint: | Duke University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 302 |
| Release Date: | 16 February 2026 |
| Weight: | 499g |
| Dimensions: | 152mm x 229mm |
| Series: | A Camera Obscura Book |
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Critics Review
“In Marc Francis’s well-researched and robustly imagined Curating Deviance, art-house revival has found both a cultural history and curatorial rationale that goes beyond nostalgia. With a theorist’s acuity and a cinephile’s affection, Francis reframes stories of imaginative curators and programmers who transformed the movie calendar into a renegade syllabus of maverick desire.”—Tavia Nyong’o, William Lampson Professor of American Studies, Yale University
“Witty, theoretically astute, and rigorously researched, Curating Deviance opens new theories of intertextual signification through close reading of ‘promiscuous programming’ in late-twentieth-century repertory and art houses. Francis’s prose is accessible enough for undergraduates, and his arguments will satisfy and surprise seasoned exhibition and queer cinema historians alike.”—Caetlin Benson-Allott, author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television
Marc Francis
Marc Francis is Manager of Film Programming in Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University and has worked at HBO, Warner Bros, and Paramount.
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