The London BFI Flare LGBTQ+ film festival: "A celebration of difference and diversity" or normative hegemony?

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the scholarship on queer spaces and queer film festivals by offering an approach that critically analyses white normativity within the queer film festival, scrutinising both who shapes these spaces and for whom they are shaped. Situating queer film festivals as political sites of counterpublics that enable potential resistance and solidarity against dominant heteronormativity and cisnormativity, this article examines whiteness and white privilege within those spaces, using London's 2018 BFI Flare: LGBTQ+ Film Festival as a case study. In-depth discourse analysis of Flare's 2018 festival documents and ephemera informs the article's argument. Building upon intersectional and postcolonial feminist work on spaces and diversity politics, this piece contends that current Western queer film festivals, such as Flare, are spaces embedded in homonationalist discourse that replicate historical in/exclusion and construct racialised arenas. In this way, they perform "feel good" diversity while lacking an interrogation of normative whiteness, able-bodiedness, and cis male gayness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]