Zoom Out: Queer Apocalypse and Television Time

Part of a study of "science fiction at the margins" (for the Getty Foundation), this paper ponders apocalyptic cinema centered on queer liberation and experience.  Through a close reading of The Second Coming (Jack Walsh, 1993), I examine the specifically televisual dimensions of the apocalyptic imaginary, framed through (of course) Heidegger's discussion of the "world picture" and Derrida's subsequent meditations on television.

Amy Villarejo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Film, Television, and New Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was formerly Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Humanities, Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She has published widely in cinema and media studies, including Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Duke University Press, 2003), which won the Katherine Kovacs award for best book from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. She is author of Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Duke University Press, 2013) and Film Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2013). She is co-editing, with Ron Gregg, The Oxford Handbook to Queer Cinema (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Her essays have appeared in a range of peer-reviewed journals including New German Critique, Social Text, GLQ, Film Quarterly and Cinema Journal, now JCMS. She serves on the boards of Film Quarterly and JCMS. She regularly teaches television studies and history, queer media, feminist media studies, the history of global cinema, 3rd cinema and critical theory.