Queering Bunuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema

As the father of cinematic Surrealism, extensive critical attention has been devoted to Luis Bu?uel’s cinema. Much has been written about his first Surrealist films of the 1920s and 1930s and the French art movies of the 1960s and 1970s. However, here for the first time is a queer re-reading of Bu?uel’s Spanish-language films allowing us to view Bu?uel’s cinema through a lens of queer spectatorship. Focusing on the films Bu?uel produced in Mexico and Spain during the 1950s and 1960s, Juli?n Daniel Guti?rrez-Albilla argues not that Bu?uel’s films have a homosexual subplot, but that there are multiple forms of identity, subjectivity and sexuality present in these films. Queering Bu?uel brings together the fields of film studies, feminist and queer theory, Hispanic studies, psychoanalysis and art theory. Guti?rrez-Albilla succeeds in reconceptualizing Bu?uel’s Mexican and Spanish films beyond geographical, historical and disciplinary boundaries, questioning not just how we see Bu?uel, but also how we see cinema.