Mobilizing lesbian desire: the sexual kinaesthetics of Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party

Abstract

Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party (1929) has been reclaimed for a lesbian cinematic canon, but it is only relatively recently that scholars have engaged more directly with the homoerotics of Arzner's films, and the question of the representability of female homosexuality in late 1920s Hollywood classical cinema. This essay frames its engagement with these concerns in terms of The Wild Party's generic history. Often claimed as instituting a new lesbian genre, the all-female college film, The Wild Party's innovations can be more persuasively traced to its subtle transformation of an older, nearly exhausted genre: the flapper film. Expanding the film's generic antecedents to consider the flapper as a discursive figure of 1920s American culture, I situate The Wild Party within developing modern female kinaesthetics and spectatorships, during a period in which Hollywood was also systematizing its commodification of femininity and the production of heterosexual romance narratives. If, as Patricia White has convincingly claimed, the representation of female homosexuality in Hollywood film is more often veiled by ‘the public sexualization of the female body’, then in the case of The Wild Party it is the excessively feminine and kinetic bodies of the flapper that screen – that is, both project and hide from view – lesbian desire as a new form of cinematic knowledge and pleasure. Rather than isolating certain scenes for their lesbian subtext or their resistance to a contemporary pathologized lesbian reading, I argue that the sexual intelligibility of such scenes is inseparable from the kinetic aesthetics of the flapper that Arzner harnesses to organisze the film's visual schema.