The Queer Public and its Problem with Representation

The tension between demands for more and "better" queer media representation and queer theory's antagonism toward identitarian politics has plunged the queer community into a debate about who and what can claim queerness. At one epicenter of this debate is the film Call Me by Your Name. Following Michael Warner's suggestion that a public can be analyzed as discourse produced in response to a text, in this article I examine the contradictory existence of the queer public through a discourse analysis of one of its most recent canonical texts.