Queer Partisaning as Cinematic Errantry

Grounded in her experimental filmwork, Masha Godovannayas monograph Queer Partisaning: Traces of Queer Relationality as Cinematic Errantry centers around the concept of queer relationality. This formulation points to sites and diasporic social-aesthetic practices, quotidian acts, and mundane gestures of queer living, loving, and bonding, as an alternative mode of being in the world. This artistic inquiry takes the form of a queer commentary, where, as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have articulated it (1995), practice, theory, and lived experiences are inseparable from one another, and where a wide range of mongrelized genres and media for narrating queer life emerge. Globally informed by the theoretical and poetic concepts of Éduard Glissant, José Esteban Muñoz, Elisabeth Freeman, Audre Lorde, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, and others, Godovannayas cinematic errantry through queer relationality constitutes a rhizomatic methodology, where qualitative social science research, refunctioned auto\ethnography, queer theory, and experimental cinema are intertwined and stitched together into a dense weave with and through methods of post-qualitative inquiry, decolonial and queer approaches that are, in turn, constitutive of her practice of queer partisaning. In her research, Godovannaya proposes framing experimental cinema as a technology of engroupment (Freeman, 2007) and as an aesthetically potent realm where queer relations can sprout, enter practice, visual experience, and aesthetics as they find their way through, with and as filmmaking, and through, with and as films. Queer partisaning refers to Godovannayas clandestine feminist strategies of celluloid film and videomaking where queer refers to an engaged mode of critical inquiry and partisaning refers to independent artisanal work. By activating resources at hand, this innovative working method makes possible a means of visual production for whomever wishes to be involved with the filmmaker in their collaborative filmmaking process. These filmmaking strategies open up a space for queer worldmaking: of sharing with, laboring towards, and building together alternative cinematic worlds. In her book, Godovannaya argues that by relying on the experimental filmmaking strategies she proposes and by inviting other-than-western subjects of queernesses to join her in this cinematic errantry, queer relationality can be generated through an ethically rigorous, collaborative process of making an experimental film, through which this queer relationality could be dreamed of and made concrete, and, in turn, produced anew. The book is to be published in 2026 by Apparatus Press, the open-access publisher.

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