Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory

Abstract

A sustained analysis of twenty-first century lesbian cinema through a queer theoretical lens The unprecedented increase in lesbian representation over the past two decades has, paradoxically, coincided with queer theory’s radical transformation of the study of sexuality. In Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory , Clara Bradbury-Rance argues that this contradictory context has yielded new kinds of cinematic language through which to give desire visual form. By offering close readings of key contemporary films such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Water Lilies and Carol alongside a broader filmography encompassing over 300 other films released between 1927 and 2018, the book provokes new ways of understanding a changing field of representation. Bradbury-Rance resists charting a narrative of representational progress or shoring up the lesbian’s categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible. Instead, she argues for a feminist framework that can understand lesbianism’s queerness. Drawing on a provocative theoretical and visual corpus, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory reveals the conditions of lesbian legibility in the twenty-first century. In-depth case studies include: Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) Nathalie… (Anne Fontaine, 2003) Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009) Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011) Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, 2006) She Monkeys (Lisa Aschan, 2011) Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013) Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015) Key features: Explores lesbian cinema in the context of political, social and cultural transformations in LGBT civil rights while challenging the assumed relationship between visibility and progress Explores the gendered invisibility instituted in critical discourses of sexuality by queer theory’s departure from identity politics Proposes the mutual, rather than synonymous or substitutive, use of “queer” and “lesbian” to describe sexuality on screen Situates contemporary lesbian cinema in the history of the image of the woman as theorised by feminist film theory Brings together psychoanalysis, affect theory and theories of space and time in cinema to explore the range of ways in which contemporary cinema makes desire legible