Abstract

This essay builds on Jacques Rancière's exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and politics to analyse queer sexuality in Don Siegel's prison film Escape from Alcatraz. The film both illustrates and embodies what Rancière refers to as a redistribution of the sensible, an opening up of a new way of making sense of the world. In Escape from Alcatraz this sense-making is bound up with same-sex desire. Rancière is usually concerned with aesthetic practices linked to class struggle. This essay, however, examines how Rancière's ideas are also illuminating in relation to subjugated sexual experiences.