Deviant Repertories

Chapter 2 positions the post-1968 programmer as a kind of lay sexologist-cum-sociologist who mediated persistent structures of erotophobia. Programmers classified and reclassified films via malleable deviant categories inspired by and in defiance of the ordered knowledges of sexology and sociology. These two social sciences, I argue, are valuable because they describe phenomena that fall outside of reproductive heterosexuality, and thus provide robust queer rubrics for programming’s coalitional aspirations. The chapter examines a number of 1980s programs such as a Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg retrospective at San Francisco’s Roxie in 1988, a series called “Sexuality in Cinema” at Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984, and a weekly series called “Outlaw Cinema” at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles in 1981, to analyze programmers’ deviant strategies for stitching together seemingly incompatible types, practices, and identities.