Sexual Diversity in Young Cuban Cinema Margaret G. Frohlich 9783031189487

This book explores how young Cuban filmmakers have expanded the range of sexual subjectivities on screen. It analyzes cine joven (films made by young directors) from the late 1980s to the early 2020s, film reviews, articles, and materials from the Cinematheque of Cuba's archive to illustrate the confluence of sexuality, cinema, and discourses of youth. While sexual and cinematic cultures have their own unique relation to the public sphere, state institutions, and transnational flows, this book explores tensions, debates, and expressions that unite them. In an investigation of how young filmmakers employ queer strategies of self-making to bring sexual diversity to the screen, Margaret G. Frohlich shows us how cine joven takes part in the socialization of power in Cuba.

Margaret G. Frohlich is Associate Professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College, USA, where she also contributes to Film and Media Studies; Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies; and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. Her first book-length manuscript, Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders, was published in 2008 and won the international competition for the Victoria Urbano Monograph Prize of the Asociacion Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispanica. Her articles appear in The Journal of Language and Sexuality; Studies in Documentary Film; Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas (formerly Studies in Hispanic Cinemas); Letras Femeninas; and Romance Review. She has traveled regularly to Havana to conduct research since 2012, with intensive work in the archives of Cuba's Cinemateca and in consultation with its director, Luciano Castillo. In 2015, as a visiting scholar of NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, she gave a lecture on homoerotic subjectivities in Cuban film. In 2016, she co-directed a research trip to Havana with students of her course on Cuban cinema and those of a colleague's course on translation. Students heard from and interviewed faculty and directors from both of the island's film schools. She has organized several lectures on Dickinson's campus by Cuban directors and film scholars.