Intimate Media: New Queer Documentary and the Sensory Turn

The heightened visibility of LGBTQ documentaries is often viewed within critical contexts of New Queer Cinema: B. Ruby Rich’s intervention which highlighted an urgency among a new kind of practice, identifying key trends across queer film and video. This article explores contours of new queer documentary which played an important role in New Queer Cinema, re-examining ways that queer nonfiction film and video evolved out of distinctive relations to the history and traditions of the documentary form, its established practices, and commonly-held social functions. This approach underlines ways that this work’s often intense evocations of sexuality and bodily sentience as experienced across private and public space marked a crucial moment in what David Howes calls a transdisciplinary sensorial revolution. Keeping mobile and productive cross-pollinations of practice and theory in frame, this article explores emerging vocabularies for the cinematic experience by distilling components - here summed up as intimacy, gesture, and magnitude - of new queer documentary that operated not in opposition to but as part of a transvaluation of documentary’s long-established associations. With focus on the fraught politics of new queer documentary in US contexts, these concepts are analysed through key filmmakers, including Barbara Hammer, Tom Joslin, and Marlon Riggs.