Billy Elliot, Swan Lake and shifting queering effects

In this chapter, we propose that characters, individuals, and queerness are not described in movement, but it is the continuity of the movement that describes them. According to Deleuze, the ‘essence of things’ never appears at the outset but can potentially be recognized in the course of the plot (or scene’s) development and can be found in the middle (of things). Thus, in this chapter, queer is not a category of spatial identity, or a fixed label, but a temporary, mobile image; an “image in movement”. To exemplify our readings of queer, we create numerous images in movement through multi-layered texts drawing on Billy Elliot (the film), Matthew Bourne’s production of Swan Lake (the ballet), and our own conversations when watching the film and interacting with theories and theorists (e.g. Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Halperin, Sedgwick). And by the end we were thinking through images, but without these being visual. We hope to have created a whole series of open-ended, moving images of queering and Billy, of the Prince and the Lead Swan, and of ourselves, which are images both conflicting and affective, both physical and spatial. We also invite readers to go and look for additional images embedded in the film and ballet, which can be experienced by watching them. More specifically, our selections of queer images vary in length, and they are interlayered with other images and variations on queer. By means of this multi-layered text and “images in movement”, we also resist simplified notions of category and the linear structure of “a textbook chapter”. We offer instead multiple simultaneous “visual mini-sections” and shifting images, in order to replace and rethink queer as a stable, normative category.