Queer filiations: Adaptation in the films of François Ozon

Abstract

The adaptation of canonical literary texts in cinema is often linked to a genre known as ‘heritage cinema’, a form associated especially with European cinema and used to promote a conservative vision of the nation as a site of heteronormative reproductive futurity. However, recalling Judith Butler's assertion that all repetition carries within it the possibility of subversion, and, furthermore, that subversion requires repetition, adaptation reappears as a potentially queer textual activity. As Linda Hutcheon argues, adaptation is ‘repetition without replication’. Through a close reading of differing modes and techniques of adaptation in the films of François Ozon, this article will demonstrate that adaptation offers the possibility of imagining new relationalities and affective encounters beyond the heteronormative reproduction of the nation state.