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Podcast: New Books in Performing Arts
Episode: Nicholas de Villiers, "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Description: A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed ide...