Arse Bandits: Exploring Nostalgic Representations of Queerness in Gangster Films
This chapter considers the British gangster film as a site of queer masculinity, contending that the counterhegemonic world of organized crime has proven a useful space in which queer identities can be formed and articulated. Countering postliberationist criticisms that such representations of homosexuality are wholly negative, this chapter considers how the specific sociohistoric context of post—World War II Britain has provided a cultural milieu in which homosexuality and crime can coexist, particularly within mainstream film. This chapter concludes that such an analysis demonstrates the need to revisit previously abandoned heteronormative texts in order to identify homosexualities that operate outside of the contemporary metropolitan gay male identity.