Description: While scholars have theorized major film festivals, they have ignored smaller, ephemeral, events. In taking seriously minor European and North-American LGBTQ festivals which often only exist as traces within archival collections, this book revisits festival studies' methodological and theoretical apparatuses.
Brief description: Antoine Damiens is a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of English and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University (Montreal).
Review Quotes: "LGBTQ Film Festivals lays bare the extent to which film festival studies' theories and methods frequently reduce queer film festivals to being "merely" about identity instead of perceiving these festivals as central to our understanding of how knowledge is produced."
- Jonathan Petrychyn (University of Waterloo), Media Industries 8, 1 (2021)
- Dagmar Brunow, Växjö, MEDIENwissenschaft, issue 01/2021 "With his exhaustive research and intricate attention to detail, Damiens has chronicled a vital history of LGBTQ film fests, adeptly capturing a doubly marginalized culture, ghosts and all. In this moment of pause, reflection and reinvention for film festivals, it's a book we needed."
- Matthew Hays, Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 1 (2020) "An engaging and original history of queer film festivals and an insider critique of festival studies at large. Damiens has excavated our archives and offered a colourful tapestry of LGBTQ+ struggles over half a century, probing both the friendship and the activism at their core."
- Thomas Waugh, Concordia University, Canada