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The Walt Disney Company has for many years been dominating the animation industry by producing family-appropriate films that have world-wide appeal. Disney's animated films have for a long time been regarded by the broader audience as vehicles of pure entertainment. Yet, in recent years, several studies have questioned this presumed innocence. Notably, these texts are indeed permeated with rigid ideologies about race, class and gender, which inform and educate young viewers. In regards to gender, there has been a lot of research over the decades reporting how Disney's animated films have been promoting and, reiterating narrow and oversimplified ideas of gender. Besides the rich body of literature produced on the subject, little research has been done regarding non-binary representations in these films. This thesis analyses how queerness is subtly deployed as an index of deviance and villainy in several Disney animated features. In order to examine this association of queerness with villainy, this study focuses on three villain characters from three animated classics, namely Ursula from The Little Mermaid (Ashman, Musker and Clements, 1989), Jafar from Aladdin (Clements and Musker, 1992) and Governor Ratcliffe from Pocahontas (Pentecost, Gabriel and Goldberg, 1995), and scrutinizes their queer performative manifestations, as well as their function within Disney's highly heteronormative narratives. At the same time, great emphasis is placed on the reception of Disney's vilified queer subjectivities by young viewers and how the latter's perceptions of queerness might be negatively influenced by such representations. Despite the prevalence of heteronormative values in the narratives of these films , this study, ultimately, suggests that, when read through a queer lens, these villains embody unexpected vessels of queer hope.

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This thesis offers a reasoned response to Margaret Sommerville’s argument presented in “Brave New Ethicists”: A Cautionary Tale (2013), and deems the utilisation and function of the term “political correctness” in this context to be a contentious and conflictual process. Analysis demonstrates this through an account of the history of the term, in order to explain the origins of associations that the term holds to the liberalisation of topics concerning factors such as sexuality, gender and race. The argument builds to demonstrate that the term has in fact come to be a more significant player in the “backlash” to movements to liberalise these topics, rather than to the initial movements themselves. Interacts with theory on political dynamics suggested by Ernesto Laclau assists in the forming of this argument, particularly in the determining of the extent to which “political correctness” is an “empty signifier.” With a return to Sommerville, this thesis demonstrates the detrimental extent of the narrative in “Brave New Ethicists:” A Cautionary Tale, through interaction of her words with the theory and history presented, as well as noticing elements of the broader discourse that Sommerville excludes through the use of contentious rhetoric. Discussion in this thesis is set amongst the tensions of liberal and conservative confliction in recent to contemporary “western” democracies, and thus exploration of these dynamics.

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Orientalism is a mode of discourse that depicts the “Orient” as different from the “Occident” by its uncivilized nature and backward lifestyle, and a solid foundation for claims and accounts regarding the Orient’s cultures, people, lifestyles... Orientalist clichés have been so exploited that they even became a political trope in many western countries. Those fantasist depictions might be so deeply inscribed in our cultural imagery that they might already impound the cinema, a medium that offers a testimony about how the world is seen in a certain place and time. This thesis focuses on orientalist clichés related to the depiction of male gay relations and ponders whether orientalism has an impact on contemporary queer Arab cinema – in North Africa – in coproduction with Western producers. Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Joseph Boone’s The Homoerotics of Orientalism (2014), the first part of the thesis establishes the theoretical framework around Orientalism, from origin to definition, and considers the importance of sexuality and desire that strongly characterizes Orientalism. The research delves into the proceeding of orientalization through the western sexual and lust-driven viewpoint and studies the case of the hypersexualization of Algerian men in France as a political trope in the context of the Algerian Independence. The Algerian men case highlights the issues regarding masculinity and sexuality that emerge from orientalist clichés. The theoretical part concludes by drawing the current state of homosexuality acceptance and the making and reception of queer Arab films in the contemporary Arab world, a rather gloomy part that comprises censorship, illegality, misery but also a stifled North African queer activism. In this contemporary climate of crisis, one can count on one hand the number of official queer films born in North Africa, which are for the vast majority coproduced with western countries. The second part of the thesis consists of the analysis of the narrative structure – the plot and the setting – of two North African queer movies that have been released in Europe as they have been coproduced with western producers. Mehdi Ben Attia’s Le Fil (2009) is a big Tunisian-Franco-Belgian coproduction that first appeared on French screens despite of being a coproduction with Tunisia, where the movie has never been screened. Then I scrutinize Abdallah Taïa’s movie, L’Armée du Salut (2014) a Moroccan movie in coproduction with France and Switzerland that has been screened in Tangier National Film Festival in 2014.

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The word ‘madness’ is often speculatively attributed to the contemporary arts and culture. In the present thesis, I attempt to investigate what is understood by this term in the culturological tradition and how ‘madness’ corresponds with the medical notions commonly used in clinical psychology and psychiatry. Besides, I analyze the opposition of ‘madness’ and ‘norm’ and forward a hypothesis about the recently changed relationship between the two. Further, this claim is tested in a case study relating to the contemporary arts. The final conclusions reveal a new understanding and cultural potential of ‘madness’ characteristic of the contemporary arts and culture.

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By the 1990s, the independent American film gained a prominent presence in American public culture as an alternative to the hegemony of Hollywood and entertainment movies. In this vein, Ramin Bahrani’s independent cinema marks the resistance of the films that go against the grain and reject the dominant trends of the film industry. Evidently, current migratory movements around the globe have transformed the social, cultural, and political compositions of societies. Cultural products, including Bahrani’s migration-themed cinema and independent practice, render these changes and reflect the affective formations that flow between the individual and the collective. The purpose of this study is to annex an understanding of the forms of affect that are induced through the migrant body on the screen and to uncover the emergent structures of feelings that are incorporated in the texts of the films. In this vein, by adopting a comparative perspective, this research analyses the affective economies surrounding fantasy, intimacy, and upward mobility in Bahrani’s cinema. My thesis is that, the migrant body – simultaneously located and deterritorialized – in conjunction with the haptic representation of the setting aligns a socio-critical critique on the organization of neoliberal capitalist societies. To illustrate this, I analyze the early feature-length productions of Ramin Bahrani namely, Man push cart (2005), Chop shop (2007), and Goodbye Solo (2008). By studying the formal questions of aesthetic experimentation along with socio-cultural ones, this research uncovers the importance of the collapse of fantasy and failure in the development of Bahrani’s protagonists. Chronologically, in these three films, Bahrani reinvents the protagonists and moves towards an autonomous character that is capable of transgression and imagining alternatives. To mark Bahrani’s political gaze in witnessing global cycles of violence, struggle, and survival, pathoscape, by signifying the circulation of affective registers and emotions that are mainly the offspring of the current global flows, demonstrate a three-level of individual, national and global identification. In line with recent politicization and globalization with migration, dealing critically with issues surrounding change and transformation, Bahrani by problematizing the image seeks to draw an embodied response in the viewer while offering new ways of seeing and feeling. .