The Queer Art of Feeling: Futurity, Fin de siglo, and New Queer Realism

Abstract

This article takes Lucio Castro’s Fin de siglo (2019) as a paradigmatic example of broader formal and aesthetic shifts in recent queer world film, most notably towards narrative slowness, a lack of dramatic tension and an intimate focus on the quotidian realities of queer lives. Through the frameworks of ‘new queer realism’ and queer futurity (Muñoz 2009; Ahmed 2010; Freeman 2010), the article contends that the screening of queer lives in a more realistic, observational manner is not a refusal of politics but rather a recalibration of the politics of queer representation for the contemporary period.