Dr Karl Schoonover, of the University of Warwick’s Department of Film and Television Studies, most recent book Queer Cinema in the World has been named the 2017-2018 Katherine Singer Kovács Award for the year’s outstanding book in cinema and media studies by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).

Co-authored with Rosalind Galt, Queer Cinema in the World was recognised as the best monograph written on film and media studies in the past year, with the award honouring 'original works that significantly advance scholarship and thinking in the field either by opening up new lines of inquiry or by consolidating existing ones at a high level of accomplishment’.

Commenting on the award Dr Schoonover said:

"We’re delighted to receive this acknowledgement and we hope that this award will encourage work by emerging queer media scholars around the world.

"We wrote the book in a polemical way. We wanted to point out how queer film is already at the centre of film culture and so should also be at the centre of critical discussions about the moving image in general. We'd be thrilled if SCMS’s acknowledgement of the project’s importance were to bring a wider audience to the book and its questions. "

Rosalind Galt said:

“The SCMS book prize is the pre-eminent award in our field and it means the world to us to receive this recognition from our peers.

"We have developed long-term relationships with many queer filmmakers, curators, and activists who helped us greatly along the way, and we are excited to bring more awareness to the work of these brave and brilliant practitioners."

Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, in Queer Cinema in the World Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies.

Moving beyond the gay art cinema canon Queer Cinema in the World considers a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.

25 January 2018

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