Slow waters: Marco Berger’s Taekwondo and the queer erotics of boredom
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Recent critical approaches to slow queer film in Latin America have focused almost exclusively on the depiction of non-normative sexualities and desires, neglecting both the representational politics of cinematic slowness and the haptic potential of screening queer corporeality. This article bridges that critical gap in contemporary queer film studies through a theoretical framework that combines a phenomenological reading of Marco Berger’s Taekwondo (2016) with an examination of the film’s ‘sexual politics of the slow and the boring’ (Schoonover and Galt 2016). Berger’s consistent visual emphasis in Taekwondo on the naked and semi-naked male physique demands a critical sensitivity towards the filmic nexuses of touch and sexuality, and of slowness and queerness. The film also demonstrates a reluctance, however, through its formal and aesthetic qualities, to fully explore the ‘radical potential of slowness’ (Schoonover and Galt 2016). As such, this article examines how the fusing of the haptic and the slow in Taekwondo simultaneously incites and impedes the film’s queer potential, revealing an implicit caution on the part of the director to fully embrace a queer undermining of normative modes of seeing – and feeling – the cinematic image.
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1460-2474