Put your Marxism where your mouth is: queer punk negation and sustained radicalism in the cinema of Bruce LaBruce

Abstract

This thesis provides the first systematic scholarly analysis of the film work of queer auteur and pornographer Bruce LaBruce. Through queer, historical and close textual analysis the thesis aims to address what I identify as a gap in scholarship by elaborating the nexus between LaBruce’s oeuvre and contemporaneous developments in queer cultural criticism. The thesis is motivated initially by the question of why it is that a critical neglect of LaBruce’s work has persisted in both film and queer theory. In response to this question, I argue that the lack of scholarly attention paid to LaBruce is in fact the result of a consistent strategy on his behalf to evade cooptation. I argue that LaBru..