Networks of Feeling: Affective Economies of Queer & Feminist Film Festivals on the Canadian Prairies

Film festivals are full of feeling. As complex institutions, affective labour underpins the work of programmers and festival staff. As public events, films screened at festivals can be well-received pictures, poorly-reviewed flops, or events met with protest, controversy, and outbursts of public emotion. The relationship between these different types of emotion, affect, and feeling is a complex yet an often-overlooked aspect of film festivals. This dissertation develops a theory of affect through the history of the queer and feminist film festivals on the Canadian Prairies from 1985 to 2005. Drawing on the vast collection of public and private archives available on these festivals, as well as interviews and ethnography, I attend to the ways the regions network of film festivals have produced and have been produced by affect and how affects of dis/interest, disgust, shame, and happiness circulate within film festival networks. The circulation and production of different affects at various points in these festival histories have had profound effects on how these festivals organizefrom how organizers relate to each other and to their publics, to the kinds of funding they accept and the politics of their programming. I consider the ways in which these affects circulate and how such organizational and discursive affects underpin the network of relationships between gay, lesbian, womens, and racialized bodies within and around film festivals. I further consider the role lesbians and feminists of colour had in organizing this network of film festivals, the place of public and private funding and state institutions like the NFBs Studio D, and the intersections between queer and feminist film festivals and human rights activism. I argue that complex and diverse economies of affect structure film festival institutions and networks. These affective economies can be most clearly traced through film festival archives.