Nordic Queer Cinema

This special issue, edited by Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä and Ingrid Ryberg, explores queer world-making, utopian visions, and tensions between sexual and national belonging in Nordic and Baltic cinema cultures. Film culture has been key in building the image of Nordic LGBTQ friendliness, and “diversity” has become a catch phrase for various national film institutes, while queer film scholarship has long recognized the problems with politics of visibility. Going beyond the language of diversity, the featured articles and essays in this issue discuss recently produced queer, trans and non-binary films across the region, addressing aesthetics and politics of representation as well as contexts of production. Underlining the high stakes in the cinematic imagining of alternative queer and trans worlds, contributors ask: who and what are the subjects that can inhabit and become legible within national, regional, sexual, gendered and racialized categories?