The Ballads of Gravity

There seems to be a crisis about how to cope with ‘sex offenders’ generally. Are they ill, and if so, what is the cure? Alternatively, are they ‘evil’? What or whom are they offending? Nature, the Law, Society? And how, more generally, do we know what makes one erotic activity good and another bad? Is it a matter of divine ordinance, biological nature, or social convention? Can we really be sure that our own desires and pleasures are normal, natural, nice – or that we are? Why does sex matter so much? (Spargo, Tamsin. Postmodern Encounters: Foucault and Queer Theory.1999.p.5). Cinema is one structure among others that constructs sexuality. It may construct or destruct the structured ‘normative patterns’ of the socio-cultural understanding. The structured ‘normative patterns’ of the social set up direct an individual towards the designed norms of morality and vulgarity in order to cop him or her with the usual flow of collective consciousness. The normative structural patte

Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative (Halperin 62). In general, 'Queer' may be seen as partially deconstructing our own discourses and creating a greater openness in the way we think through our categories. Queer theory is, to quote Michael Warner, “a stark attack on normal business in the academy” (Warner 25). It poses the paradox of being inside the academy whilst wanting to be outside of it. It suggests that a "sexual order overlaps with a wide range of institutions and social ideologies to challenge the sexual order is sooner or later to encounter these institutions as a problem” (Warner 5). Queer cinema as a term came about quite probably, by identification with the trends in critical theory begun in the mi