Sexual Diversity in Young Cuban Cinema

This book explores how young Cuban filmmakers have expanded the range of sexual subjectivities on screen. It analyzes cine joven (films made by young directors) from the late 1980s to the early 2020s, film reviews, articles, and materials from the Cinematheque of Cuba's archive to illustrate the confluence of sexuality, cinema, and discourses of youth. While sexual and cinematic cultures have their own unique relation to the public sphere, state institutions, and transnational flows, this book explores tensions, debates, and expressions that unite them. In an investigation of how young filmmakers employ queer strategies of self-making to bring sexual diversity to the screen, Margaret G. Frohlich shows us how cine joven takes part in the socialization of power in Cuba. 

“This book is especially valuable for Frohlich’s insightful analysis of the filmmakers’ use of new media technologies, original cinematic language, and engagement with the rich Cuban film tradition, while assessing how the younger generations are negotiating their contemporary sense of identities with the evolving project of the nation. This is a must read for anyone interested in Cuban film, gender and sexuality studies, and contemporary Cuban society.”   

Michael J. Horswell, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature, co-editor of Sumergido: Cine Alternativo Cubano, Florida Atlantic University, USA

"Margaret Frohlich’s sparkling book is a welcomed addition to the Cuban cinema bookshelf.  It addresses cine joven’s contributions to civil society/state debates of the past 40-30 years focused on issues of sexual diversity, participation, and identity and its intervention could not be timelier: Cuba’s young filmmakers continue to explore intersecting discourses of youth/sexuality and queer subjectivities in the face of a state that continues to sharpen the edges of what is considered acceptable.  Frohlich’s book offers us many tools through which to understand the complex landscape of sexual diversity and civil discourse in Cuba today."

Ana Lopez, Professor of Communication and Director of the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute, Tulane University, USA

"Frohlich has written a lively, useful and much needed book about sexual diversity in Cuban cinema. It fills a huge gap in scholarship about sexual diversity and audiovisual culture in Cuba. Also, focussing on the most innovative and active sector—the cine joven—allows for these films to be given a context and a good reading that they deserve.

I greatly appreciate the breadth of sources, across both linguistic cultures and including sources like interviews, reviews, online and peer reviewed. I also found the contextual knowledge the author provides to be rich, critical and detailed enough to be able to place the sexual politics and policies in a vibrant conversation with the films and filmmakers."

Susan Lord, Professor of Film and Media at Queen's University, Canada and Director of the Vulnerable Media Lab 

“Frohlich’s timely and unprecedented reading of the Cuban cinematic queer transnation is a poignant examination of LGBTQI+ voices in contemporary young Cuban cinema. The antipatriarchal analyses in this compelling book explore the power of queer themes, identities and aesthetics as reflected by filmmakers, films, initiatives, and spaces linked to the Muestra Joven, a crucial platform for the representation of nonnormative sexuality and the thrust towards alternative visions of collective belonging in Cuba.”

Zaira Zarza, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History and Film Studies at Université de Montréal, Canada

“Frohlich examines the exciting young filmmakers whose films have fought to queer Cuban public and private spaces. Through her analysis of these independent short and feature-length films moving beyond State-defined decades of heteronormativity and homonormativity, Frohlich’s book serves as an un-erasable archive of these independent works. The filmmakers and the films that she unpacks test not only the boundaries of representations of queerness on Cuban independent screens, but also the possibilities of living as one’s true and multi-faceted self on the island and in its diaspora.”

Michelle L. Farrell, Associate Professor, Associate Professor of Spanish, Fairfield University, USA

Margaret G. Frohlich is Associate Professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College, USA, where she also contributes to Film and Media Studies; Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. Her first book-length manuscript, Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders, was published in 2008 and won the international competition for the Victoria Urbano Monograph Prize of the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica. Her articles appear in The Journal of Language and Sexuality; Studies in Documentary Film; Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas (formerly Studies in Hispanic Cinemas); Letras Femeninas; and Romance Review. She has traveled regularly to Havana to conduct research since 2012, with intensive work in the archives of Cuba’s Cinemateca and in consultation with its director, Luciano Castillo. In 2015, as a visiting scholar of NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, she gave a lecture on homoerotic subjectivities in Cuban film. In 2016, she co-directed a research trip to Havana with students of her course on Cuban cinema and those of a colleague’s course on translation. Students heard from and interviewed faculty and directors from both of the island’s film schools. She has organized several lectures on Dickinson’s campus by Cuban directors and film scholars.