All Feelings are Queer Feelings: Queer Worlding Through Affect in the Films of Xavier Dolan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The highly stylised melodramas of Québécois filmmaker Xavier Dolan use particular affects to represent queerness and express how normative social conventions impact queer lives. This thesis analyses the functions of shame in I Killed My Mother (2009), rage in Laurence Anyways (2012), disgust in Tom at the Farm (2013), and nostalgia in Mommy (2014) to convey conflicts between queerness and heteronormativity. Formal analysis of Dolan’s films is paired with queer and affect theories to clarify his queer worlding - in other words, the objects and symbols that construct Dolan’s queer cartography. Informed by Jack Halberstam’s theory of queer temporality, this thesis investigates Dolan’s portrait of heterosexual norms’ influence on the affective worlding of queer lives. While the focus is on queer temporalities, scholarship on queer childhood, rurality, and utopia also illuminate Dolan’s singular style. Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on queer childhood sheds light on the cyclical nature of shame depicted in I Killed My Mother, while Susan Stryker’s account of trans rage demonstrates the function of colour in Laurence Anyways. Furthermore, queer theories of disgust inform Tom at the Farm’s subversion of the rural gay cowboy trope. Finally, concepts of nostalgia validate the sonic doubling of music in Mommy to promote queer utopian values. Ultimately, this analysis of affect, form, and style highlights how Dolan’s cinema spotlights the transformative power of negative affects to displace heteronormativity with queer worldviews.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".