Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Looking after Lesbian Cinema
- 1 The Woman (Doubled): Mulholland Drive and the Figure of the Lesbian
- 2 Merely Queer: Translating Desire in Nathalie … and Chloe
- 3 Anywhere in the World: Circumstance, Space and the Desire for Outness
- 4 In-between Touch: Queer Potential in Water Lilies and She Monkeys
- 5 The Politics of the Image: Sex as Sexuality in Blue Is the Warmest Colour
- 6 Looking at Carol: The Drift of New Queer Pleasures
- Conclusion: The Queerness of Lesbian Cinema
- Notes
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Looking after Lesbian Cinema
- 1 The Woman (Doubled): Mulholland Drive and the Figure of the Lesbian
- 2 Merely Queer: Translating Desire in Nathalie … and Chloe
- 3 Anywhere in the World: Circumstance, Space and the Desire for Outness
- 4 In-between Touch: Queer Potential in Water Lilies and She Monkeys
- 5 The Politics of the Image: Sex as Sexuality in Blue Is the Warmest Colour
- 6 Looking at Carol: The Drift of New Queer Pleasures
- Conclusion: The Queerness of Lesbian Cinema
- Notes
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1998, the celebrated lesbian film scholar B. Ruby Rich wrote: ‘I don't want to make the mistake of falling into that comfortable old victim box, complain-ing of absence in the midst of presence. We're not invisible anymore’ (58). In 1999, Patricia White observed that lesbianism was by now ‘an intelligible social identity, visible on the nation's television and movie screens’ (6). And Julianne Pidduck signalled in 2003 the ‘ “hypervisibility” of lesbian/gay/queer works’ in North America (266). Two decades ago, then, it became possible to suggest that the lesbian had reached the realm of the visible.
Cultural visibility does not exist in isolation, of course, but rather arises out of the normalisation of anti-homophobia campaigns and the broadening of civil rights for LGB (more rarely TQ+) individuals, couples and families. Even in the era of Donald Trump's presidency – or perhaps as a response to it – diversity seems to have become the watchword of the cultural and other industries in the USA and beyond. Social media movements to end sexual harassment such as #metoo and #timesup have coincided with calls for further diversity across the sector. In the twenty years since scholars started to speak of visibility as a possibility and probability, significant transforma-tions have occurred in spheres from the military, to the Catholic Church, to marriage equality. Social visibility has been institutionalised, commodified and politically manoeuvred.
In autumn 2017, during the final stages of writing this book, I booked tickets for the London Film Festival and found that I was spoilt for choice. For romantic drama, the Billie Jean King biopic Battle of the Sexes (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2017); for social satire, Sally Potter's The Party (2017); and for the rumours of an unexpected genre twist, Good Manners (Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, 2017), whose blurb, as it turned out, with-held another twist, the centrality to the film's plot of lesbian desire. It may still be hard to imagine the lesbian version of the mainstream reality television show Queer Eye (David Collins, 2018–) coming into existence – a female journalist declares on Twitter that ‘Queer Eye is fine but I would like a companion show with butch women helping straight women who want to feel comfortable being less performatively feminine’ (Goldfield, 2018).
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- Information
- Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory , pp. ix - xivPublisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2019