“I Am a Lesbian”: Black Queer Subjectivities in The Watermelon Woman and Pariah

Abstract

Abstract In 2011, cultural critic Nelson George asserted, “Pariah is important, not simply as a promising directorial debut, but also as the most visible example of the mini-movement of young black filmmakers telling stories that complicate assumptions about what ‘black film’ can be by embracing thorny issues of identity, alienation and sexuality.” However, filmgoers, myself included, were offended at the New York Times comparison of Pariah to Lee Daniel's Precious (2008), another “Black” movie, but with such radically different content that one wonders if the reviewers actually watched Dee Rees's Black lesbian coming-out story. Much like Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman, another film written, directed, and produced by a Black lesbian, Pariah was marketed as a “Black” film, effectively ignoring its queerness. And while both movies received favorable reviews, neither film did very well at the box office, suggesting that Black moviegoers had little interest in Black lesbian film. Hence, this essay will address the ways in which two Black lesbian filmmakers, Cheryl Dunye and Dee Rees, wrote, produced, and directed films that sought to counter common stereotypes regarding queer Black subjectivities, specifically those of Black lesbians, and how their struggles to produce, market, and distribute these films are indicative of the challenges that Black lesbians in the United States still face due to racism, sexism, and homophobia. To be sure, Black lesbian filmmakers are “contest[ing] the dominant gendered and sexual definitions of racial difference by working on black sexuality” (Hall 1993, 274), in this case, Black queer subjectivities in the form of Black lesbians. Stuart Hall also reminds us that the struggle over cultural hegemony “is never about pure victory or pure domination . . . it is always about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture, it is always about changing the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power, not getting out of it” (107). Thus, late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Black lesbian filmmakers were engaged in challenging contemporary discourses that ignore the particularities of race and gender when it comes to representing LGBT experiences in film, thus hoping to exert agency over their representations in popular culture. I assert that both Pariah and The Watermelon Woman work to expand the archive of Black lesbian filmic representations by focusing on the ways in which Black lesbian identities are validated, embraced, and complicated by Black women in the United States. At the same time, these films reveal the unique challenges that Black lesbian filmmakers face from the film industry, as well as from their own communities.