Queer Aesthetics

The Watermelon Woman

We've seen that queer aesthetics are the materials, methods, techniques, and effects that support queer poesis – queer self making and queer social making.

What techniques do the films Watermelon Woman and Nitrate Kisses use in order to dramatize queer poesis, and to what ends?

1. Intermediality: relations between media as meaningful as content within medium. 2. montage: construction requires active viewers putting together the pieces. 3. Self-naming: “I am a Black, lesbian filmmaker.” Hammer's reflection in mirror. 4. embodied performance: performing as “Cheryl” in front of camera; musical

performances included in the film. 5. creation of “historical material” (mockumentary AND mock-autobiography) 6. use of music and musicality – however off key! - in the visual image 7. depiction of erotic self and intimate sociality

How do these techniques compare between both films?

1. Both are eminently concerned with historical, personal, cultural, and sexual memory. 2. One argues that political liberation in the present, for the future, demands that we FIND the fragments out of which we can piece these histories together. 3. The other argues that if you cannot find them, that is also a function of power, and that you may need to CREATE the history you need to live in your body and your community.

How many sources of archival memory does Cheryl find (that is, does Cheryl Dunye invent) in her search for the “real” Watermelon Woman?

1. video rentals (consumer artifacts) 2. “on the street” or “on campus” interviews with everyday people or with film students 3. her mom (and her “files” in the basement, that is, boxes of disorganized personal stuff) 4. Tamara's friend Lee, a collector, with an extensive fan collection 5. the local library (with several sources potentially helpful, but an elitist, exclusive attitude) 6. Shirley Hamilton (her mom's old friend, and a member of the Philadelphia lesbian community) 7. How about the love scenes with Diana (Guinevere Turner)? Is desire a source of information?

(see clip ending around 44 min.) 8. Camille Paglia, that is, academically-situated “cultural critics” 9. Performance by “Sistah Sound at Women's Community Center” (51:28); or the folk singer on

the street after Cheryl misses June but receives her documents (1:08:52) 10. Family of Martha Page, located by Diana 11. Center for Lesbian Information Technology (also not helpful - coded as “white”) 12. June (Faye Richards' lover, whom Cheryl doesn't get to meet because of a health emergency)

What institutions or sites of memory production and recovery involving sexual memory - besides industrial Hollywood - does Cheryl discover? Why is recovering “sexual memory” - that is, memory of our intimate erotic lives that we can use to locate ourselves in history and in culture – so difficult?

1. The video store itself 2. the “street” - everyday life itself becomes an archive to the extent people respond

3. private homes and personal memory communicated orally 4. Informal unorganized archives – like her mom's basement 5. informal organized archives like Lee's 6. formal archives like libraries or CLIT 7. historical jazz clubs pictured in photos 8. local community groups 9. local social events based around music 10. black film production histories 11. NAACP 12. universities (Bryn Mawr) 13. factories or worker communities like the one where Shirley worked 14. others?

The film's staging of these sources and sites seem to be a response to Hammer's imperative in Nitrate Kisses to go out and rediscover your own history: if your own history doesn't exist, you may have to invent it. What are some of the implications of such a comparison of Nitrate Kisses with Watermelon Woman?

Each says that “self making” and “social making” are also a matter of “history making” as well as “making futures.” Sexual “histories” and “genealogies,” in fragments or in fictive form, are an important potentiality of queer poesis that becomes material and knowable through queer aesthetic practices.

1. self-making 2. social making 3. historical documentation 4. political futurity