Engaging Queerness: The Privilege of Nausea

Curator’s Note

In her 2004 book Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Vivian Sobchack explores numerous topics within a phenomenology of cinematic spectatorship, including depictions of disorientation in films, the role of technology in mediating one’s experience of their body, and the role of synaesthesia in empowering the embodied spectator. While Sobchack approaches a non-androcentric analysis through her consideration of sexual difference in becoming lost in space, these essays lack a serious consideration of the broader issue of Queerness. In an earlier work, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Sobchack asserts the potential of bodies qualified externally with respect to sexual difference, race, and other facets of identity to be liberated from this “disfigurement.” Given the pressure of cisheteronormative patriarchy, bodies which are “Other” with respect to sexuality or gender (including all variants of femininity) can be considered Queer relative to the traditionally-privileged male perspective. In this video essay, I argue that sensations of disorientation and nausea produced in virtual reality cinema constitute a new cinematic language for engaging with the embodied queer experience.

The broad schema of the video draws upon the schema of American road culture, particularly its masculine norms. Inspired partly by a joke within the LGBTQ+ community that “gays don’t drive,” I wanted to use the frame of technologically mediated spatial ability (i.e. driving) as an experience which could be queered through certain other spatial elements. I break up the fluidity of my queer body and my friend’s female body maneuvering through the space of the road at night with manipulations of a second camera. These interjections, meant to engender feelings of nausea and anxiety (echoing the impulse to jump when looking over a precipice), constitute embodied experiences of disorientation. Intravaginal footage serves as a commentary on the disorientation of sexual embodiment, particularly for queer individuals with a fundamentally shifted relationship to what sex “is.” The use of aural chaos and reversed driving footage functions as a queering of driving as a normative display of spatial ability, culminating in a chaotic, anxiety-inducing final sequence.

I owe a great debt to the phenomenological concepts explored in Sobchack’s Carnal Thoughts, as they constitute the foundation of this project. My greatest struggles came in determining the specific situations which I would use to communicate the complex realities of queer embodiment and sexuality, especially since these would need to be doubly articulated in the “language” of the film. Coincidentally, my thesis concerning VR’s potential function as a language of queerness parallels this concern with the navigation of physical and digital spaces.