Books by Chris Perriam

The book advances the current state of film audience research and of our knowledge of sexuality in transnational contexts by analysing how French LGBTQ films are seen in Spain and Spanish ones in France. It studies films (in various media and platforms) and their reception across four languages (Spanish, French, Catalan, English) and considers and engages with participants from across a range of digital and physical audience locations, with a particular focus on festivals. It examines films that chronicle the local (in portraying national and sub-national identities) and draws on the regional-global (translating and transferring foreign models of non-heterosexual experience). No comparative and crosscutting study with audience research at its heart has yet been undertaken.

There is a lot more to Spanish Queer Cinema than Pedro Almodovar or the gay comedies of the 1990s. A wealth of short films, documentaries and features -- many by, for, or about lesbians -- is at the core of a creative culture responding to exceptionally intense social changes. The country has moved from institutionalising same-sex unions at the regional civic level (from 1998) to legal recognition of same-sex marriage (in 2005). Moving images and the debates and conversations around them have made a stand against homophobia and exclusion, responded to health and welfare crises, questioned or affirmed the value of same-sex marriage, and constructed new forms of love and community. They, and their audiences, build a new Spanish queer imagination. The book opens all this up, and shows some of the wider social contexts and forms of communication which underpin it.

Places Villena's creative work in relation to the contemporary Spanish cultural scene, to 20th century homosexual culture and to gay and dissident figures of the past, including Lorca and Luis Cernuda. This book explains how he developed a radical aesthetic out of the old raw materials of love, sex, death, power, and the primacy of art and desire.