| Abstrakt: |
This ·article addresses the ideological hypocrisy of neoliberalism that Tbe Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018) exposes by subverting the neoliberal imaginaries of lesbian/queer desire in North American popular cinema with its self-negating queer biopolitics. I argue that through the inscription of queer desire in power relations based on Foucauldian biopower and neoliberal governmentality, the film sheds the neoliberal illusion that individuals compete on an equal footing and reveals normalized socio-political oppressions propagated by the neoliberal conceptions of gender and sexuality. More specifically, the film's foregrounding of anachronistic revisionism in terms of gender expectations and gendered politics and of the three female protagonists' aggression and vulnerability questions various familiar neoliberal tropes in contemporary queer films-homonormativity, sexual diversity, a predominant focus on intimacy and romance, and the delegitimization of lesbian agency. By considering 7be Favourite as a resistant text, the article brings the oft-overlooked ·and little-examined problematics of the female sex, the feminine, and lesbianism on screen conceived in neoliberalism to the forefront. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
