Soukaz in space: visuality, protest and appropriation in the films of Lionel Soukaz

Since the 1970s, Lionel Soukaz has deployed his camera as a sledgehammer against the limits of bourgeois pseudo-toleration and its normative models of identity and citizenship. Yet the relatively disparate nature of scholarly and curatorial engagement with his œuvre has largely occluded analysis of the evolutions in his filmic practice, and, notably, his engagement with the politics of space. Bringing his films into dialogue with the writings of Henri Lefebvre, the author analyses the treatment of spatiality across Race d’ep (1979), La Marche gaie (1980) and the Journal Annales (1991–2013). Drawing on Edin Kinkaid’s reading of Lefebvre, Montgomery approaches film as a medium for reframing and dismantling the abstract space of modern capital. Soukaz’s critique of republican universalism reveals the cis- and heteronormative logics of abstract space, operative in an illusory binary between public and private. His films blur the boundaries of the embodied subject, at once opposing the creeping co-optation of queer lives by capital, and the pathologising discourses to which they have been historically subjected. Yet this revolutionary project often falls short of its own liberatory promise. Montgomery asks how we might engage with Soukaz’s challenging legacy, at a time when new strategies of visual resistance are urgently needed.