Role Models: John Waters and His Influence(s)

Throughout his career as a queer film director, author, and showman, John Waters has both expressed devotion to those cultural figures that influenced his own work and inspired generations of artists to follow in his filthy footsteps. Film and media scholars have addressed various elements of his filmography and cultural impact—most recently Chris Holmlund’s Female Trouble: A Queer Film Classic—but few have thoroughly considered Waters in relation to the question of influence itself.

This panel reflects on the place of confusion in British and American modernism. Confusion has not been traditionally considered a proper scholarly response to textual analysis; critics are supposed to interpret a text rather than allow themselves to experience its uncertainties. What happens when we explore the confusion we feel when reading not as something to be worked through, but as something to be worked with? Building on affect theorists’ work on how our feelings can influence the way we read, such as Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading and Rita Felski’s reflective and post-critical reading, how can considering confusion change both our experience of reading and our critical practices?

This section of the academic journal “Sinestesieonline” is open to contributions about theatre and performing arts in all historical ages, forms and variations, in English, Italian and foreign languages.

“Il Parlaggio” is the name created by Gabriele d’Annunzio for the amphitheatre in Vittoriale – a place of empathy, a cradle of emotions, a crossroads of cultures, a connection between antiquity and contemporaneity, an emblem of the “neverending show”.