Abstract

Norman McLaren’s homosexuality has not been taken into account in readings of his work, which is often characterized as abstract and highlighted for its technical value. We propose to bring his sexual orientation to the foreground, outing his work from the episthemological closet where it remains cornered. We will use the surreal Love on the Wing as an entry to that hidden and codified in order to thus interpret the birds that appear in his films as representations of the author’s homosexual desire, as well as all the flying and mutating elements, which participate in a dialogue among his surreal, abstract, and even realist works. We shall see how after the censorship of Love on the Wing, McLaren could have wanted to make this sexual code more difficult to read and how this tension and ambivalence created a fluid, fragmented, very queer body and space as far as the meaning that the new phenomenologies and theories of space and body are giving us.

Download PDF: https://www.academia.edu/attachments/47598811/download_file?st=MTQ2OTczMTQ3MSw4MS4yMDIuMzcuNjIsMzg2MjQ5MDA%3D&s=profile

SPANISH VERSION PUBLISHED IN PEERED REVIEW MAGAZINE: CON A DE ANIMACIÓN, Nº 6, PP 152-172. VALENCIA, 2016: GRUPO DE INVESTIGACIÓN EN ANIMACIÓN: ARTE E INDUSTRIA, UPV. ISSN:2173-6049