7. Thursday, July 4, 12:00 noon (NY): “Show Yourself” – queer Sámi sensibilities in contemporary cinema

This lecture is a journey through my research project about queer Sámi sensibilities in contemporary cinema and media, and the ways in which the trauma of settler colonialism, including the traumatic repression of gender and sexual diversity, haunts the popular imagination. I will propose that queer Indigenous theories can expand our understanding of gender and sexuality overall through notions of sovereign erotics, non-human kinship, and desire, while examining two film examples more closely: the immensely popular animated children film Frozen II (2019), produced in collaboration with a board of Sámi experts, and the Swedish fantasy-horror-romance movie Border (Gräns, 2018), about two trolls passing as humans, falling in love, and reckoning with a past and present of persecution. These films may not necessarily appear to be about queer, trans, Indigeneous or Sámi themes at the first glance, but hopefully by the end of this lecture, they will appear so to you, as they have come to appear to me.