A Queer Claim to the World: Stanley Cavell, Tangerine, and Acknowledgment

This thesis explores the resonances of Stanley Cavell's thought on film for contemporary, queer, and postcritical engagements with the medium. Cavell's insistence on film as a "moving image of skepticism" requires, as a response to the medium, a response to skepticism, which, for Cavell, is acknowledgment: a transgression across the boundaries of self and temporality figured in this thesis as an especially queer starting point for interpretive method and an act necessary for queer life and community. Centering acknowledgment as a queer response to the realism of film is explored through engagement with the Sean Baker film Tangerine (2015), in a reading that locates the importance of acknowledgment in queer life and film studies.