“Our bodies are hydrophilic”: Queer Hydro-Politics in Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM (2017)

Abstract

The HIV/AIDS crisis has become a core theme in contemporary French cinema reflecting upon queer loss and collective response in times of social precarity. Despite the abundant use of liquid imagery in these works, scholarly discussion of how such imagery produces a conception of liquidity through which queer embodiment can be reimagined remains limited. This paper examines how Robin Campillo’s 120 Battements par Minute/120 BPM (2017) mobilises liquid imagery to reconfigure queer embodiment and its political possibilities during the AIDS outbreak. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water (2017), I argue that Campillo constructs queer bodies as permeable, porous, and gestational, thereby resisting the hegemonic heterosexual ideology premised upon the metaphysical integrity of the self – an idea that has facilitated gay oppression. Attending to Campillo’s deployment of liquid imagery across multiple scales, this paper investigates water as both a metaphor and a physical element, considering the proximity between queer corporeality and wider bodies of water as a trans-corporeal ethic that sustains marginal existence. I argue that Campillo’s queer hydro-politics transforms liquids from signs of contamination into an ecological medium of shared vulnerability, collective action, and non-reproductive futurity. This queer futurity challenges both systematic oppression of gay people and the prevalent anti-social thesis in queer theory.